On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 12:05:39 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Jeff M" wrote in message
m...
On 6/1/2010 9:55 AM, rangerssuck wrote:
On Jun 1, 8:19 am, Jeff wrote:
On 6/1/2010 7:00 AM, rangerssuck wrote:
[snip]

I live in a suburb of New York. over 50% non-white minorities. I live
on a very racially mixed street. No one I know in this town owns guns.
When you read the police blotter in the local paper, it's all about
the drug busts and DWI. Burglary is pretty much a non-issue. I wonder
why that is.

Whatever the reason is, it's probably not due to the alleged
non-ownership of guns. Moreover, gun ownership is seldom the subject of
casual conversation by responsible owners. Lots of folks won't tell you
about the guns they own, especially if they sense your attitude.

I never said that gun ownership or lack of it was the reason for the
low rate of burglary here or in Gunnerland. Gunner, on the other hand,
clearly implied that the low rate of burglary in his neighborhood was
due to the fact that many houses have guns in them.

Gunnerland, as he describes it, is an entirely fictional place. Others
have documented the pathetic reality. Nonetheless, I'd imagine that, in
reality, there are a few more gun owners in your neighborhood than you
know about. However, I seriously doubt that rates of gun ownership are
even correlated, much less causally related, to residential burglary
rates, in any case.

I haven't checked this for years, but there is some inverse correlation
between burglary rates and gun ownership -- across INTERNATIONAL lines. I
never tried to analyze it within the US. The few cities that outlaw guns
have so many other variables involved that I question whether you could even
do a good regression analysis on them.

Of course, our rates of violent crime remain very high, relatively speaking,
even with (or because of?) high rates of gun ownership in the US. If you
want to try to correlate gun ownership on a *regional* basis with burglary,
that can be done, but only in the nine census regions studied by the General
Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. They
do the only credible, regional survey of gun ownership. The fact that there
are different numbers and types of metropolitan regions within those census
regions makes it questionable how useful your conclusions would be, in any
case.

Based on having done such analyses before, I'd say you're in for four or
five hours of work. And you may need a university account to get into the
GSS for free; I haven't looked for over a decade. The University of CT,
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, publishes the data. Then you'll
need to run those numbers against the FBI's Uniform Crime Report data, which
is free online.

Without that work, you'd just be blowing smoke or pulling opinions out of
your butt, like most of the commenters in this thread.

Hey, I can clear this up no problem. I bought my first gun in 40
years in 2005. I have bought at least one gun per year since then,
and crime has dropped every year since then. It is therefore obvious
that my buying guns reduces crime, I've done a public service, and my
future selections should be subsidized with government funding.

Ed, you make things far too complicated. G

"Don Foreman" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 12:05:39 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Jeff M" wrote in message
om...
On 6/1/2010 9:55 AM, rangerssuck wrote:
On Jun 1, 8:19 am, Jeff wrote:
On 6/1/2010 7:00 AM, rangerssuck wrote:
[snip]

I live in a suburb of New York. over 50% non-white minorities. I live
on a very racially mixed street. No one I know in this town owns
guns.
When you read the police blotter in the local paper, it's all about
the drug busts and DWI. Burglary is pretty much a non-issue. I wonder
why that is.

Whatever the reason is, it's probably not due to the alleged
non-ownership of guns. Moreover, gun ownership is seldom the subject
of
casual conversation by responsible owners. Lots of folks won't tell
you
about the guns they own, especially if they sense your attitude.

I never said that gun ownership or lack of it was the reason for the
low rate of burglary here or in Gunnerland. Gunner, on the other hand,
clearly implied that the low rate of burglary in his neighborhood was
due to the fact that many houses have guns in them.

Gunnerland, as he describes it, is an entirely fictional place. Others
have documented the pathetic reality. Nonetheless, I'd imagine that, in
reality, there are a few more gun owners in your neighborhood than you
know about. However, I seriously doubt that rates of gun ownership are
even correlated, much less causally related, to residential burglary
rates, in any case.

I haven't checked this for years, but there is some inverse correlation
between burglary rates and gun ownership -- across INTERNATIONAL lines. I
never tried to analyze it within the US. The few cities that outlaw guns
have so many other variables involved that I question whether you could
even
do a good regression analysis on them.

Of course, our rates of violent crime remain very high, relatively
speaking,
even with (or because of?) high rates of gun ownership in the US. If you
want to try to correlate gun ownership on a *regional* basis with
burglary,
that can be done, but only in the nine census regions studied by the
General
Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center.
They
do the only credible, regional survey of gun ownership. The fact that
there
are different numbers and types of metropolitan regions within those
census
regions makes it questionable how useful your conclusions would be, in any
case.

Based on having done such analyses before, I'd say you're in for four or
five hours of work. And you may need a university account to get into the
GSS for free; I haven't looked for over a decade. The University of CT,
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, publishes the data. Then you'll
need to run those numbers against the FBI's Uniform Crime Report data,
which
is free online.

Without that work, you'd just be blowing smoke or pulling opinions out of
your butt, like most of the commenters in this thread.

Hey, I can clear this up no problem. I bought my first gun in 40
years in 2005. I have bought at least one gun per year since then,
and crime has dropped every year since then. It is therefore obvious
that my buying guns reduces crime, I've done a public service, and my
future selections should be subsidized with government funding.

Ed, you make things far too complicated. G


Wow, Don. With analyses like that, you could be a politician. g

--
Ed Huntress