More Junk Numbers

Man, this report just spins like a top! When the antis have an agenda they will do ANYTHING to cook the numbers to garner support!

Laws in all 50 states permitting people to carry concealed firearms in public have been connected to a rise in violent crimes, according to a new report from researchers at Stanford and Johns Hopkins universities.

The report, published in September and issued as a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper last week, adds to a series of studies over the last decade tending to discredit the “more guns, less crime” hypothesis, which argues that right-to-carry laws serve as crime deterrents by allowing ordinary Americans to better protect themselves.

The new findings suggest that right-to-carry laws are “associated with substantially higher rates” of aggravated assault, rape and robbery, Stanford law professor John J. Donohue III, one of the study’s three authors, explained in a press release on Friday. Stanford law student Abhay Aneja and Johns Hopkins doctoral student Alexandria Zhang co-authored the report.

Well this goes direly in the face of the numbers presented by the pro-gun side that violent crime is DROPPING while gun laws are being relaxed and more people own guns.

Among violent crimes, the most significant increase came in aggravated assault, which may have risen by nearly 33 percent, according to the report. The researchers also found that from 1999 to 2010, murder rates rose in eight states that adopted right-to-carry laws.

First up, there is no citation of HOW MUCH the murder rate increased, and if it is a raw increase or adjusted for increase in population. The Aggravated Assault numbers are far more interesting. First from the press release the Huff-Po is referencing it reads a LOT different.

The strongest evidence was for aggravated assault, with data suggesting that right-to-carry (RTC) laws increase this crime by an estimated 8 percent – and this may actually be understated, according to the researchers.

Is this a typo? Are they citing directly from the paper that I don’t have access to? Is this like the Kellermann data where the numbers constantly went down every time he was questioned?

Either way from the story:

In 2012, there were nearly 9,000 firearm homicides in the United States. A year earlier, more than 21 percent of an estimated 751,131 aggravated assaults in the nation were committed with firearms.

So 33 Percent, or 8 percent, according to the article only 21 percent of the aggravated assaults use guns, so even if the crime is increasing the “Gun Crime” is DECREASING, making this conclusion enigmatic at best, intentionally dishonest at worse.

Now even with such biased sources they can’t just out-and-out LIE, so the Huff-Po Article closes with this:

The report also “corrected a number of flaws in the data” with new statistical methods, Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told The Huffington Post.

Based on the new research, Webster concluded that “right-to-carry laws increase firearm-related assaults” — though he noted that “the exact magnitude of that effect is uncertain.”

And the Presser closes with this:

“Different statistical models can yield different estimated effects, and our ability to ascertain the best model is imperfect,” Donohue said, describing this as the most surprising aspect of the study.

He said that many scholars struggle with the issue of methodology in researching the effects of right-to-carry laws. But overall, his study benefits from the recent data.

Donohue suggested it is worth exploring other methodological approaches as well. “Sensitive results and anomalies – such as the occasional estimates that right-to-carry laws lead to higher rates of property crime – have plagued this inquiry for over a decade,” he said.

So yeah, even the guys who wrote this paper aren’t going to hang their hats on it.