Quote of the day—BJ Campbell

There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. The correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.

BJ Campbell
March 13, 2018
Everybody’s Lying About the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide
[Via email from daughter Jaime.

For people who care about practical outcomes but think rights and constitutional law are irrelevant this article may be influential.—Joe]

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8 thoughts on “Quote of the day—BJ Campbell

  1. Influential? I doubt it. Certainly the left will ignore this because it doesn’t fit their wishes.
    The per-state data looks strange. Gun ownership in Hawaii is 45%, with that state’s repressive policies? And NH is 14%? I don’t think so. For one thing, how can they know the number for NH given that NH has no registration, no licensing, and refuse to disclose CC permit numbers (back before Constitutional Carry)?
    The other question I would ask is: so what is John Lott, chopped liver?

    • The author addresses the ownership rate in the states. He, essentially, calls it unknowable. But as long as the author uses the same sources as the anti-gun people and draws much different conclusions it shows the anti-gun people are deliberately deceptive.

      • Yes; deliberately deceptive also in pretending to care about practical outcomes. It’s quite easy to make the case that they can see the practical outcomes of many leftist/collectivist/coercive authoritarian policies, see that they’re terrible, and call for more.

        Al Capone funded various humanitarian projects too. It doesn’t mean he was a nice and compassionate guy. This is a “thing”, a tactic, among the coercives, generally, and it deserves more attention. So how does one know whether “compassion” is being feigned or whether it’s real?

        First off, one cannot claim compassion while advocating coercion– That’s what we may call a “dead give-away”, right there

      • I’m confused. If he calls ownership rates unknowable, why would he show graphs that pretend to show ownership? By the way, I don’t see that statement. I tried to look at the source (article in Injury Prevention) but that isn’t accessible. The abstract seems to indicate it’s based on a survey, which means it isn’t accurate and is definitely biased low.

        Also if the X axis of his graph has no connection to reality, it must follow that his correlation coefficients have no relation to reality. Which translates to “the article is utter garbage”.

        • He didn’t use the word “unknowable”, I was paraphrasing from memory. Read the paragraph that ends with:

          We can be absolutely certain that at least one of these studies, if not both of them, are wrong on the ownership rate data set. We know this purely because the data sets differ. They can’t both be right. They might both be wrong.

  2. Would like to get John Lotts opinion on this but not sure I want to ask publicly.

    • Why not ask publicly? He’s not exactly shy about answering claims like this one.

  3. State level data is a bit fuzzy. How about we go block by block in, say, Baltimore and see how the results come up.

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