Statistics for all seasons
by John Coochey
Canberra Times
18 January 1999
Is the gun lobby right and its opponents wrong? John Coochey, a Canberra economist and researcher, takes an expert look at the figures used to support both sidess' causes and points out possible conclusions that might come to something of surprise.
The phrase "lies, damn lies and statistics" is ascribed usually to Mark Twain and interpreted usually to mean that when numerical data seems to support your preconceptions it is valid, but when it does not you can disregard it safely.
What might have been a better phrase would have been "there are those who cannot interpret statistics, those who choose to falsify them and raw data which is subject to misrepresentation".
Some recent examples of data's being misrepresented include the National Health and Medical Research Council-funded study of abortions, from which it was concluded that abortions had not increased per capita since the 1930s.
Despite the fact that the team included highly paid academics and the head of a major teaching hospital, it had misinterpreted the data grossly by including spontaneous miscarriages in the 1930s data but excluding them from later periods.
In fact, there had been a massive increase since the 30s.
When this was publicised, the NHMRC had to withdraw the paper.
Despite this, the discredited data appeared subsequently in an information paper by the Public Health Institute and two articles in The Canberra Times.
On another occasion it took the financial might of the Tobacco Institute to fund a court case that showed that on another reference not only had the NHMRC refused to read submissions that did not support its preconceptions but a sociologist, Simon Chapman, had advocated concealing data that showed very few deaths from passive smoking - not what he wanted to hear.
Sometimes "statistics" change with new management. In 1997 Pru Goward, the head of the Office of the Status of Women, ridiculed the Women's Electoral Lobby for telling the United Nations falsely that 70 per cent of police time in NSW was spent on domestic violence; but Ms Goward neglected to say that the figure had come from the OSW the previous year.
International comparisons are particularly hazardous. For example, the case of Switzerland is often used in the gun debate, "pro gunners" pointing to a low armed crime rate in a heavily armed society and "anti gunners" pointing to a high suicide rate.
In fact the suicide rate is very similar to that in other Tyrolean countries, where recording a death as suicide might be more acceptable than it is in countries with a large Catholic population, where a coroner might go to lengths to record it as accidental death.
Likewise, in a prosperous full-employment economy, one would expect violent-crime rates to be less prevalent, whether or not firearms were readily available.
The Canberra Times made editorial comment recently on gun-related deaths in Australia using the "situations" in Japan and the United States to illustrate its argument. Japan has a low incidence of murders and firearm ownership whereas the reverse is true in the USA. Ipso facto, guns cause murders. In fact the situation is considerably more complex.
Japan has a very low crime rate per se, largely because of a draconian legal system that would probably be unacceptable in any Western country, intrusive policing leading to a percentage of "conviction upon arrest rate" in the high 90s, usually by the confession of the "perpetrator". The full situation in the US is often misrepresented.
For example, the murder rate for whites is very similar to that of much of Western Europe and figures disclosed at a recent Australian Institute of Criminology Conference showed that when gun-related murders were excluded from US data the rate was still more than twice that of Australia, even when Australian murders involving the use of firearms were included.
What bulks up the US rate is the rate among Hispanics, about 2« times that of whites and even higher among blacks, ranging up to six times that of whites.
If guns cause murders, one would expect these ratios to be reversed, higher-income whites having access to more and better firearms. Furthermore, the vast majority of both US murder victims and perpetrators have serious criminal records.
In other words criminals are killing other criminals, particularly if they are involved in the crack cocaine trade. It has been pointed out frequently that those US states with the highest crime rates have the most stringent gun-registration rules. The reply to this is that criminals buy their weapons where they are easily available but, if this were true, one would expect firearm-related crime to be much the same all over the US.
This is not the case. FBI statistics show that for the entire state of Vermont there were only 12 murders, Wyoming had 16, North Dakota 18 and New Hampshire 20. When expressed in the more usual way this is 2.1 per 100,000 for Vermont, 3.5 for Wyoming, 1.72 for North Dakota, 2.6 for South Dakota, and 1.8 for New Hampshire. These figures are considerably smaller than in Australia's Northern Territory, with a rate of about 11 per 100,000 with very tight gun laws, almost identical with those of the ACT (which has the lowest rate in Australia), but high alcohol consumption, a large young male population and high levels of domestic violence among the indigenous community.
In some US states the murder rate is of course higher. Florida has 8.9 per 100,000 and New York 13.3, but these rates are lower than in many European cities that do not have any particular reputation for violence. For example, Copenhagen has a murder rate of 10.5 per 100,000. Helsinki 15.9 and Amsterdam seems to hold the lead at 38, four times that of Florida, which has a reputation bad enough to scare a friend of mine when he had to stop over there on his way home.
His home town is Bogota, Colombia.
What has actually happened in Florida is that since it has allowed qualified residents and interstate visitors to carry handguns the violent crime rate has decreased faster than the national average. The only group of potential victims who are known to be unarmed are international visitors, which is why attacks on them have increased.
Indeed, the most sophisticated study yet done of this aspect of firearm ownership in the US has shown that those states that have allowed the carrying of handguns by qualified civilians have shown a faster reduction in violent-crime rate than those that have not. Even those who do not carry guns are protected, potential muggers not knowing who will be able to fight back and who will not.
Once factors such as ethnic make-up and degree of urbanisation have been taken into account, the number of "lives saved" exceeds any increase in such factors as domestic murders or accidental deaths. What such states have seen is that there has been an increase in crimes in which the victim would not normally be present, such as car theft.
Is it really a case of "lies, damn lies and statistics", or is it a case of "all the facts that fit we print", preconceptions sometimes overruling objective investigation?
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