I saw an interesting article over at Medium the other day entitled “Everybody’s Lying About the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide.”

Now as a conservative and happy gun owner I’ve long known that “figures don’t lie, but liars figure” — particularly about guns and violence.

But I’ve also long accepted the idea that — perhaps counter-intuitively — more guns actually equals less crime. Dr. John Lott has done some good studies on this and the correlation seems to be pretty clear.

Except, according to BJ Campbell at Medium, it’s not.

The actual correlation, according to him, is that it doesn’t matter. Homicide rates, one way or the other have been dropping across the developed world since the peak in the early 1990s regardless of rates of gun ownership or what forms of gun control have been implemented.

Indeed, in the U.S., despite an all-around loosening of regulation across large swaths of the country murder rates are lower per 100,000 residents than they have been in decades.

In point of fact, when comparing apples to apples, the United States ranks 83rd in homicide rate worldwide at just under 5 homicides per 100,000 people. The No. 1 country? El Salvador at more than 108 intentional homicides per 100,000. In the U.S. you’re more than twice as likely to die in a car wreck, at 12.4 deaths per 100,000 than homicide.

So how then, is half the country — or more — convinced that “deaths by gun violence” are on the increase?

Well for one thing, groups like Everytown for Gun Safety, Vox and Mother Jones lump suicides in with murder. They also include justified homicides by police and average citizens in the “gun death” statistics.

While you can make the argument that if you’re studying “gun deaths” you should include those, but the problem here is the stat is used in a misleading way.

First, the stats are almost never broken out by category — and all too often the fact that justifiable homicides and suicides are included with murder statistics is either mentioned only in passing or not mentioned at all.

As Campbell points out:

Suicide, numerically speaking, is around twice the problem homicide is, both in overall rate and in rate by gun. Two thirds of gun deaths are suicides in the USA. And suicide rates are correlated with gun ownership rates in the USA, because suicide is much easier, and much more final, when done with a gun. If you’re going to kill yourself anyway, and you happen to have a gun in the house, then you choose that method out of convenience. Beyond that, there’s some correlation between overall suicide and gun ownership, owing to the fact that a failed suicide doesn’t show up as a suicide in the numbers, and suicides with guns rarely fail.

Not only that, but the biggest cadre of suicides? Men in their professional years — and the difference is stark.

And it’s being largely ignored by the media.

If you really look at the numbers fairly, with an uncritical eye, it becomes clear — the real crisis is not gun deaths, but suicide.

If we really want to save lives, we’ve got to figure out how to address the crisis that is causing people in their most productive years to decide their existence is so bleak they want to end it.

Mental illness is as real as physical illness and we simply are not doing enough to reduce the stigma associated with it.

This is not to suggest that murder isn’t something which should be addressed, but we have mechanisms in place to deal with that — and all too often help for mental issues is simply unavailable.

What’s clear here is — as the old saying goes, “figures never lie, but liars figure.” The spin on the antigun side is to lump in unrelated statistics to make the “gun violence crisis” look worse than it is, but that’s long been known among gun rights advocates, what’s more interesting is that rates of firearms ownership may simply have no effect on crime either way.

Given that, there is simply no reason to regulate firearms at all.

All IMHO, of course.

— Patrick Richardson is the managing editor of the Pittsburg Morning Sun. He can be emailed at prichardson@morningsun.net, or follow him on Twitter @PittEditor.

