Forbes: Second most “gun friendly state” is DC
Maybe he was talking about Bizarro DC, you know that DC which is the exact opposite of the one on our planet. But this Niall McCarthy fellow, writing in Forbes, needs to check his research when he claims that DC has 66 firearms for every 1000 citizens. If they do, then Niall isn’t counting legally owned firearms – somehow he got the criminals to confess to possession of their illegal guns. The police department in the city that has all but banned guns for thirty years still recovers about 2000 illegal guns every year from the streets.
He claims that Wyoming is the most “gun friendly” state because they have 196 guns per 1000 citizens;
Even though Wyoming is awash with guns, one for every five residents, its violent crime rate is relatively low compared to other states. Nevertheless, a high rate of gun suicide is still cause for serious concern.
A concern for who? People who tend to commit suicide? Yeah, they should give up their guns, but the rest of us who aren’t committing suicide should be left alone. Why doesn’t Niall tell us the number of suicides in Wyoming since he made a point of mentioning suicide?
Category: Guns
Wyoming! Here I come!
CUe the Twilight Zone th
CUe the Twilight Zone theme music:
Hmmm. Neither the link provided nor a direct search through the Forbes site leads me to the McCarthy article. I wonder if it has been quashed. According to the captured paragraph above, McCarthy says that Wyoming is awash in guns, yet has a rate of one gun for every five residents. Assuming that’s true, then there aren’t enough guns for a whopping 80% of Wyoming residents. I guess what he understands awash to mean and what the rest of the English-speaking world does are quite different. And then there’s that stat that surprises him, that despite all of the hardware in Wyoming, its violent crime rate is low. Knock. Knock. Anybody home in there Niall?
is this based off background checks? If so, I guarantee it will be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay low.
I wrote the post last night, so Forbes must’ve taken it down overnight.
The interesting thing about this gun suicide issue for the grabbers is that they are always using Japan as a reference point for gun murders but they tend to avoid talking about suicides. That’s because Japan has a rate of suicide that is about twice as high per 100k as the US. And they have very few guns, thus the reality of suicide has nothing to do with guns and everything to do with mental illness and how it’s treated.
They have a third of the population we do and almost as many suicides while having very few firearms available to the general populace. Guns don’t lead to suicide. Mental illness does and in the absence of firearms the evidence in Japan, and many other low gun count nations, indicates that those intent on harming themselves will do so quite successfully with or without access to firearms.
Suicide is a personal tragedy, as is addiction or schizophrenia or any other form of illness involving the brain pan. The treatment of that issue and the lessening of the stigma that surrounds receiving that treatment will go much further in actually saving lives than any law enacted to control the method of suicide.
Your post reminded me about this. I had seen it in a story a couple years ago.
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/the-creepy-confines-of-japans-suicide-forest
Well, web caching is a wonderful thing:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XY1R6mSc0fkJ:www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/01/05/americas-most-gun-friendly-states-infographic/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
I’ve also archived a copy in case Jonn needs one.
If D. C. is gun friendly by his measurements, then his measurements are off.
Out of curiosity, I looked at some more of this guy’s work…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/
Looks like he just randomly plugs in poll results into a chart generator and makes inane observations that are vaguely supported by the pretty colored lines.
And he never supplies any links to his source data either.
If I knew it was that easy to write for a major publication, I would have started emailing my resume around long ago. With lots of pretty charts showing how a Gallup poll of Ukrainians shows that over 80% approve of my chart-building skilz…
That is all….
Well, at the bottom of the graph (Thanks, Hondo!) is this source: Bloomberg, ATF’s National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, U.S. Census Bureau
Well, when one sees the name Bloomberg anywhere near an article about guns, the antenna better go up fast and high. But it turns out someone has already chopped, sliced, and diced the Forbes/Bloomberg piece as total and absolute bullshit.
“What the graph so proudly touted by Forbes and Bloomberg actually represents is the number of “nationally registered” devices under the NFA or National Firearms Act. These are your machine guns, suppressors, sawed off shotguns, mortars, etc…They are for extreme collectors as well as firearms manufacturers and dealers, as well as those individuals who possess select fire weapons such as M-4’s and MP-5’s. The National Firearm Registration and Transfer Record is a highly regulated tax and monitoring system run by the ATFE to keep tabs on the gear out there in America that keeps the government up at night. It does not, as the graph would lead one to believe, track a national firearms registry of long guns and hand guns.”
SOURCE: http://www.commdiginews.com/politics-2/forbes-and-bloomberg-miss-the-mark-on-guns-32901/
Thankfully, it looks like Forbes did strike the article. Now, I hope it takes Niall McCarthy and whoever approved that pap and puts them on the “DO NOT ACCEPT” list
Sorry – I was wrong. He does occasionally post a link to the source data.
Also – he calls himself a “Statista data journalist”.
I wonder where he went to college for that career field…
Well, Geewillickers, what he did was worse than omitting his source: He gave attribution but blindly replicated the Bloomberg bullshit without pondering it himself. Alternatively, he did review the ATF material and definitions but chose to mislead readers as to what the stats represented. Either way, it’s a major fail.
This is a link to FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data for 2013, violent crimes, table 4, Crime by region and state.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/4tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_4_crime_in_the_united_states_by_region_geographic_division_and_state_2012-2013.xls
You may note that Washington DC has about 1,281 violent crimes per 100,000 population. It appears that they are the big winners in robbery and aggravated assault. The second highest state is Alaska with 602 per 100k. So DC has double the number 2 state, and 3.5 times the national average.
That is a record that they can be proud of. Not.
The Forbes statistic pegged my BS meter and bent the needle but then I started to wonder, maybe they were including some of the legislation passed by our recent Congress – for sure some of that was violent crime.
What parallel universe is this guy living in? Or he he just smoking some of the GOOD shit?
The Soviet Socialist Republic of California is LIGHT-YEARS more “gun-friendly” than DC, and that’s saying something! I am wondering where he gets his numbers from. One gun per five citizens? I thought Massachusetts had more than that. Hell, the SoCal town I live in is more like three weapons per citizen (before you count my collection, which may or may not skew the figure even higher*)–all legal, no less!
*Well, at least until that damned boating accident last year… 😉
I read the title of this piece to my g’son this morning at oh-dark-too-damn-early (I was taking him to school – a good, bright boy he is), and he looked at me like I had just grown an extra idiotic head.
Nevertheless, a high rate of gun suicide is still cause for serious concern.
Suicide is generally a bad thing. So stipulated. But the interesting thing is that suicide by firearm is way more common among men than women, particularly older white and black men. Women, and male Hispanics and Asians, tend to use some other method (per CDC statistics). If I can’t walk away from the person blathering about “gun suicide” as if it was somehow distinct from “suicide” I ask them why they hate women and “men of color” when they clearly place more importance on preventing old white dude suicides versus suicides by other demographic classes. Considering the likely politics of the blather-er, this is a low blow. Usually get a really dirty look after all is explained; the best response so far has been “Uh, uh … oh, f*ck you!”
I think th DC suicide rate is lower because they count visitors as part of there data base. I found this note on there data.
City-data.com crime rate counts serious crimes and violent crime more heavily. It adjusts for the number of visitors and daily workers commuting into cities
Read more: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Washington-District-of-Columbia.html#ixzz3O68xANN1
They use to have a higher murder rate too, but if you can reduce the rate by statistics it really makes people feel safer.