Ed Huntress wrote:

"BottleBob" wrote in message
...

Ed:

So would the Andrew Ford quote be acceptable if it were changed to:

============================================
"27 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on,
^^^^
and walk down the street with no permit of any kind:
some say it's crazy. However, **2 out of 3** US murders
^^^^^^^^^^^
are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?" --

It depends on whether you like propaganda or not. If you find that kind of
argument acceptable (and you know why it is or isn't), you, too, may be
accepted for a Joseph Goebbels Scholarship at the university of your choice.
g

Ed:

OK, I can see where the quote was misleading.

Richard Lewis seems to have gathered some gun murder statistics from
the year 2000 that tend to challenge your own data.
Being the curious sort, I went to the following CDC site myself and
checked the gun homicide data for the year 2001 for every state. I used
Richard Lewis' data on which states were "open carry" and which weren't.

http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_fy.html

I'm not going to list each state (too much typing), but the total gun
homicides for ALL states was listed as 11,348. And that I calculate
there were 2,710 gun homicides in the "open carry" states. 2,710 /
11,348 = .23
But it seems the "open carry" states are some of the most sparsely
populated ones, which would seem to severely skew these statistics. And
the death rate per 100k people figures for each state are all over the
map with little correlation to "open carry" states or "non open carry"
states.

Oh, one other comment. I can certainly see why people don't bother to
check this sort of data... ITS TOO MUCH WORK! g

--
BottleBob
http://home.earthlink.net/~bottlbob