The latest crime statistics for England and Wales have been released. Sharon Howard has a good round-up of reactions to the statistics:

What’s happening here is that the British Crime Survey is suddenly being discounted by Tory politicians because it’s showing falling crime levels (and, indeed, has been since the mid-1990s), whereas the police statistics record increases in violent crimes (but falls in most other categories). They’ve latched onto the one category and set of stats that are of use to them. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, will no doubt have criminologists everywhere in stitches—or in shock—with this assertion: “The most reliable measure of crime is that which is reported to the police”.

when it comes to trends there should be little doubt that the BCS will be more reliable than the ‘official’ police figures. Unless it’s inconvenient for you as an opposition politician in the early stages of the run-up to a general election.

This article has some more rationalizations from Joyce Lee Malcolm as to why the inconvenient BCS figures can’t be trusted:

The government now seems to be insisting that the police actually record a higher level of the crimes reported to them, but don’t seem willing to explain what proportion or how it is being done. As a result, as crime rates go up dramatically in police statistics, especially for violent crime, the government keeps saying they are not really going up, it is just that the police are using a different method of recording crime. But for some crime, such as murder, the police could not easily have been under-reporting in the past, although they do track murders to pull them from the totals if the final judgment is anything less than a court finding of murder. At this point the government has used the “new method of calculating crime” excuse so repeatedly and without explanation that I am inclined not to trust their assurances that crime is going down or remaining steady. Murder, for instance, is at the highest level since statistics were kept.

I think the international crime victimization study released in 2002 is more reliable and offers a comparison of how England and Wales are doing compared to other industrial countries. Sadly, England has many times the violent crime of most European countries. But their methods of fighting crime by disarming and prosecuting victims is so counter-productive that the results do not surprise me. Unfortunately it is in the government’s interest to demonstrate that its crime-fighting initiative is successful, which makes its assertions doubtful.

1. Malcolm does not give any reason at all why the ICVS study should be more reliable. The BCS has a sample size twenty times as large as the ICVS and no reputable statistician would consider the ICVS to be more reliable.
2. The ICVS does show that England more violent crime than most European countries, but Malcolm has greatly exaggerated the difference. The study shows that English rate of contact crime (3.6%) is not “many times” that of most European countries (average 2.2%).
3. As explained here, Malcolm’s claim that England prosecutes victims is concocted by selective quoting from cases and doctoring quotes from law texts.
4. Malcolm is a noted pro-gun advocate, so it is in her interest to demonstrate that English gun control has increased crime, which makes her assertions doubtful.

03:43 | /guns/UK | Add the first comment | link

The Akron Beacon Journal reports that a trial on whether punch card ballots were constitutional has been delayed. Why? Read on:

ACLU lawyers complained Wednesday that the state’s last-minute filing hadn’t given them enough time to study the evidence—a report comparing punch cards with other voting methods. …

The ACLU had wanted the judge to declare punch cards unconstitutional.It argues that the ballots—the bane of the 2000 presidential election—aren’t uniform and don’t alert voters to a mistake, as electronic machines do. The ACLU also contends that the state’s “unequal” balloting system violates the rights of blacks, who live in predominantly punch-card counties.

The report in question Wednesday generally supports the use of punch cards. It was written by John Lott Jr., a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Lott revised the report earlier this year and submitted a new version to the state weeks ago. However, the ACLU didn’t get the new version until last week.

A spokeswoman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office couldn’t say why the revised report was filed only Friday.

But she said that’s irrelevant.

“We believe that the conclusions in both reports are identical,” Kim Norris said for her office, which represents the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office in court.

ACLU attorney Dan Tokaji said Lott’s revised report has 11 additional pages. The original version, he said, contained “serious flaws.”

“The report contradicts what the secretary of state has been saying for months, that punch cards need to be replaced,” he said. “… The state is talking out of both sides of its mouth.”

Most experts seem to think that punch cards are a lousy system, but they obviously don’t have Lott’s way with statistics. Lott’s report is here. Even Lott is forced to concede that punch cards have a higher undervote rate in the presidential race. However, Lott argues that this is cancelled out by a lower undervote in the state races. I can’t say that I’m impressed with this argument. The state races aren’t as important, so undervotes there aren’t equivalent to undervotes in the presidential election. Also, the undervote rate is much higher in the state races, so that most of the undervotes must be intentional—Lott is comparing intentional undervotes with unintentional ones.

Lott also includes 36 demographic variables for age, sex and race in his analysis. He included these in his “More Guns, Less Crime” analysis as well. As Ayres and Donohue have pointed out, these variables are strongly correlated with each other. (This is called multicollinearity.) This can cause spurious results. Ayres and Donohue found that Lott’s MGLC results,

are incredibly sensitive to the inclusion of various seemingly unimportant demographic controls.

Apparently, then, Lott and Mustard’s thirty-six demographic variables mimic time trends in crime that we can control for directly with our controls for state trends.

Incidently, Dan Tokaji has a blog where he writes about voting technology.

03:03 | /guns/Lott/misc | Add the first comment | link

Some weeks ago Lott wrote this article, where he dismissed concerns about fraudulent electronic voting as “conspiracy theories”. As far as I can tell Lott has no expert knowledge about computers, and rather than do any research into the electronic voting machines, he has just invented his own version of the way these machines work. For example, he wrote:

After the election, most electronic voting machines transfer the election results to a compact disk or some other “read only” format. These CDs are then taken to a central location where they are read into a computer.

All of the tallies are kept on PCMCIA cards.

In this thread at The High Road, pro-gun activist Jim March explained how he emailed Lott, writing:

Dr. Lott,

You may remember me. I’m the gun rights activist out in California who has been tracking racism and misconduct in concealed weapons permits; I have an autographed copy of “More Guns, Less Crime” and I am otherwise a huge fan of yours.

Which is why I was saddened by the factual errors in “Voting machine conspiracy theories”

Problem: one, all three of the biggest and most suspect vendors (Diebold, ES&S; and Sequoia) do NOT use read-only CDs. They use PCMCIA read/write memory cards. Security problems with the data on these memory cards has been noted before. One of the Diebold internal memos that has been leaked discussed that very issue, in a report of a conversation with a California SecState staffer name of Lou Dieder:

Calling myself, Bev Harris, Professor Rebecca Mercuri, Dr. David Dill, Professor Doug Jones and others “conspiracy theorists” doesn’t address the underlying disaster here, and I am deeply disappointed in your column.

Professor Lott, you did important scholarship on the CCW issue in ‘97 with Prof. Mustard. That, you researched. If state governments always acted sanely, the CCW laws in California, New York and elsewhere would have been reformed shortly afterwards. You of all people know how screwed up things can get in the public sector.

Re-think your position here. You’re being used as a stooge of some very corrupt and unethical people. You’re better than that.

Pay attention to us geeks on this one, sir.

I will await your reply before making this document public.

Lott’s reply:

I appreciate your comments, and I appreciate your interest in my work on guns. I don’t have time to respond in depth, but I will assure you that I am not a “stooge” for anyone, nor did anyone ask me to write this piece. I have done a lot of work on voting machines, having been for example the statistical expert for the minority report from the USCCR on the 2000 election and having been the statistical expert for the state of Ohio in evaluating the different voting machines. I also worked with USA Today as one of their statistical experts. I do appreciate your information and I will look at it, though I should tell you that I have talked to computer programming experts as well as those who designed these machines (as well as their competitors). Attached is also a paper that I have done that is very critical of electronic voting machines with respect to another issue. Again, no one asked me to write this.

March replied to Lott, giving details of the problems with Diebold and providing links where all of his information could be confirmed. They exchanged a couple more emails. So what did Lott do next? He publishes another op-ed in the Washington Times repeating his false claims including:

Most electronic voting machines transfer the election results to a compact disk or some other “read only” format. These CDs are then taken to a central location where they are read into a computer.

It would have only taken Lott a few minutes in the first placeto find out how electronic voting machines transfer their results. But he didn’t. After March corrected him, it was even easier for him to find out for sure that he was wrong. But he didn’t. This is the same behaviour that got Lott into trouble over the survey. If he had done his research properly in the first place he would never have made the 98% claim. And if he had been willing to admit to making a mistake he would never have told the story about conducting a survey in 1997 that has caused him so much trouble.

The latest installement in the story is here. John Fund in the Wall Street Journalquotes Lott’s saying that concerns raised by March and others sound

“a lot like an effort to anger some people into voting while providing the basis for lots of election litigation if the results are close.”

03:05 | /guns/Lott/misc | 4 comments | link

Kellermann’s studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes

Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kellerman’s “study” concluded that the presence of a gun in one’s home dramatically increased one’s chances of being killed by gunfire. As has since been widely noted, though, the study had stupendous methodological flaws that would surely have precluded its publication, were the NEJM not blinded by its fear and loathing of guns.

The study consisted of going to homes where a homicide occurred, and asking whether there was a gun in the house. Such a study by design and definition excluded successful uses of the gun (i.e., where the attacker is scared off and no one is killed).

Even if the homicide victim was someone who did not live in the house, and who was stabbed to death, the answer “yes” to the question, “Was there a gun in the house?”, would increase the correlation between guns and homicide.

Moreover, the fear of being killed by a stalker or a gang might well contribute to one’s decision to purchase a firearm. If the fear is well-founded, then we would expect gun purchasers to be more likely victims of murder than others. But that does not establish that the firearm ownership caused the crime. Analogously to Kellerman’s dishonest methodology, I could “prove” that visiting a hospital correlates with dying. This does not show that the hospital visit caused the fatal illness.

I would have hoped that before making serious charges of dishonesty against Kellermann, Krauss would have looked at Kellermann’s study, but he does not seem to have done so. And Krauss is a law professor.

05:12 | /guns/Kellermann | 11 comments | link

After a comment spambot left spam on over a hundred of my posts, I’ve decided to close comments on posts older than 60 days. I had to write a small plugin to do this. Blosxom users can get it here. You’ll also need Jason Clark’s storystate plugin.

03:22 | /meta/plugins | Add the first comment | link

Matthew Yglesias and Mark Kleiman have both written about the Assault Weapons Ban. I agree with Yglesias that the ban doesn’t make sense since it bans weapons by name rather than by some characteristic that makes them dangerous. I’ve criticized the ban in Australia on semi-automatic long guns, but at least that was based on the type of the weapons rather than it’s name. And while the ban in Australia may have caused a small reduction in the homicide rate, this reduction is too small to justify the cost of the ban.

Kleiman also states:

The evidence that crime can be prevented by restricting weapons availability to those without prior criminal histories simply isn’t there.

If you look at the numbers you will find that Australia and the US have roughly similar violent crime rates—some rates are higher in the US and some in Australia. The big difference is that in Australia guns are much less likely to be used in crime and the homicide rate is much lower. This isn’t a coincidence. Several studies have found that crimes committed with guns tend to be significantly more likely to result in the death of the victim. For example, Kleck and McElrath (Social Forces 69:669-92 1991) did a multivariate analysis on NCS and SHR data. The analysis implied that when the attacker was armed with a gun it increased the chance of a dead victim by five times as when the attacker had a knife. (I write “the analysis implied” rather than “they found” because Kleck misinterpreted his results as meaning that guns made almost no difference to lethality.)

Nor is the cost in the US of criminal gun use cancelled out by the benefit of defensive gun use. All surveys that have examined both offensive and defensive gun use have found that offensive gun use is much more common. The best data we have on this, from the NCVS, indicates that offensive use are about ten times as frequent as defensive uses. Lott claims that defensive uses are five times as common by comparing the lowest available estimate for gun crimes (430,000 from the FBI’s UCR) and a high estimate for defensive gun uses (An average of the estimates computed by Kleck *). While that produces a ratio favourable to Lott’s position, it is impossible for both estimates to be correct. According to the respondents in Kleck’s survey (which is the basis for the DGU estimates Lott uses) one fifth of his estimated 2.5 million defensive gun uses were against gun crimes, implying that every single time a criminal committed a gun crime, they encountered an armed victim. This is clearly impossible.

Some would argue that restrictions on guns to law-abiding folks would have no effect on criminals, but gun ownership by the law abiding creates both a supply (from stolen guns) and a demand (to defend against armed victims) for guns by criminals. Please note that I’m not arguing that if the US adopted Australian style gun laws it would greatly reduce gun use by criminals. Criminals in the US already tend to use guns and would want to continue to use them to defend against other criminals even if law-abiding people disarmed.

02:28 | /guns/Australia | Add the first comment | link

I’ve been having a discussion with Kevin Baker about his claim that self-defence in the UK is practically illegal. The discussion started when Carl Lindsay was convicted of manslaughter after killing an intruder who was trying to rob him. I wrote:

Pro-gunners such as John Lott, Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire have written about the Martin case, apparently unaware of the facts that showed that the killing was not in self defence, and proceeded to make bogus claims that self defence was against the law in Britain. Claims which they have never bothered to correct.

Now, there are two possible explanations for Lindsay’s conviction:

1. The jury knew more facts that those which appeared in the brief story and these showed that the killing was not in self defence.
2. Self defence is illegal in the UK.

The reaction from bloggers was swift and extensive. At the time of writing, Technorati reports 61 blogs linking to the story, all going for explanation 2, none even considering the possibility that the killing was not self defence.

Note that Tim doesn’t wonder why 61 out of 61 blogs choose option 2 - to him it’s obvious that we’re all just “gullible gunners” and there is no prior evidence that would lead us to believe that “self defence is illegal in the UK,” this story being only the latest example.

That willingness was further undermined by a broad revision of criminal law in 1967 that altered the legal standard for self-defense. Now everything turns on what seems to be “reasonable” force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville Williams notes in his Textbook of Criminal Law, that requirement is “now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law.”

Here is the entire paragraph that Malcolm pulled her quote from. It is is clear that “it” refers to “The requirement of reasonableness” and not to “self-defence”:

The requirement of reasonableness is unhappy. Enough has been said in criticism of it, and the CLRC has recommended that it should be expunged from the law. In practice, as we have seen, the requirement may be construed indulgently to the defendant, for, as Holmes J memorably said in the United States Supreme Court, “detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” As we shall see in the next section, the requirement is now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it still forms part of the law.

All putative self-defence, it seems, falls into the category of “necessary self-defence.” In this part of the judgment, the idea that the defendant’s belief is merely evidence of reasonableness has suddenly vanished; indeed, the very word “reasonable” is dropped. It seems, therefore, that the decision makes a radical change in the law. At least where the defender fears death or serious injury, there is no proportionality rule any longer; and a good thing too—in view of the jury’s verdict in Shannon. German law, it seems, gets on without a proportionality rule, and so could we, where the facts are similar to those in Shannon. The reasoning in the decision is fudged, but that is the price one pays for a beneficial change in the law.

Back to Kevin Baker’s post. He conceded that British law allows self-defence, but argued that prosecution of self-defenders means that it is not legal in practice. I challenged him on this, pointing out that he didn’t have a single case where this had occurred. In his latest post Baker tries to find “just one example of the government prosecuting someone for an obvious case of self defense”. I’ve organized the cases he mentions into a table and added several more that I was able to find. I’ve only included the ones where someone was killed because the information on the other cases is less complete, making it difficult to determine what really happened. For some of the cases I’ve given two versions of what happened. The first version only tells part of what happened and makes it look like the case was self-defence. The second version adds the details that suggest that the killing was not self-defence.

Killer	Version 1	Version 2	Outcome
Tony Martin	Shot a burglar who broke into his house.	Burglar was shot in the back while fleeing. Martin’s story about what happened was contradicted by the forensic evidence. *	Convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal because Martin suffered from a paranoid personality disorder.
Satpal Ram	Defended himself against a racist who attacked him with a broken glass. *	Stabbed victim in back 2-3 times with a flick knife as well as inflicting multiple other wounds. Did not even plead that it was self-defence. *	Convicted of murder.
Carl Lindsay	Stabbed one of four armed robbers with a sword. *	Chased robber out of his home and stabbed him the back. *	Convicted of manslaughter.
Thomas O’Connor	Stabbed in the chest an intruder who broke down his front door. *		Not prosecuted
Barry-Lee Hastings	Stabbed a burglar who he thought was armed with a machete *	Stabbed him in the back 12 times, outside the house and while the burglar was lying face down.	Convicted of manslaughter.
Steven Parkin	Stabbed a burglar *	Stabbed from behind while the burglar was fleeing	Judge directed a not guilty verdict
John Lambert	Stabbed a burglar in the chest*		Not prosecuted
Brett Osborn	Stabbed an cocaine-addled intruder * *	Intruder was unarmed and stabbed five times in the back	Pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Nick Baungartner	Tackled a burglar who suffered a severe neck injury *		Not prosecuted.
John Campbell	Stabbed a burglar who attacked him with a baseball bat *		Not prosecuted
Dean Davis	Stabbed a burglar *		Not prosecuted
Richard Watkins	Stabbed an armed robber in the chest *		Not prosecuted
Shannon	Stabbed an assailant with scissors *		Convicted of manslaughter, conviction quashed on appeal because judge did not describe the law on self-defence correctly

There is a pattern here. In the obvious cases of self-defence, the ones where the fatal wound was inflicted in the front, the killer was not prosecuted. This alone disproves Baker’s assertion that self-defence in England is practically illegal. The cases involving back-stabbing or back-shooting were prosecuted. These cases are not obviously self-defence, though it is possible they might have been. Kevin Baker argues (writing about the Hastings case):

Yes, the burglar was stabbed in the back. So? If you’re grappling with an attacker with a knife in your hand, where is the blade going to go?

In most of the cases we have similar difficulties. We have less information than the jury and are in no position to argue that they made the wrong decision. In the case of Satpal Ram we fortunately have more information. Baker points to a Guardian article that claims that Ram was convicted of murder for defending himself from a racist attack, but the author of the Guardian article (and Kevin Baker) just took Ram’s word for what happened without checking to see whether he was being truthful. Alexander Baron has a web site arguing that Ram is guilty of murder and has posted the judgment of the appeal that shows how Ram lied to the reporter. The evidence presented in the judgment shows Ram’s claims are contradicted by eye witness testimony and the coroner’s report.

Satpal Ram’s story	The truth
Satpal responded by drawing a short-bladed penknife.	Satpal used a flick knife with a five-inch blade.
Prior to his trial Satpal had only one 40-minute consultation with his barrister, the late Douglas Draycott QC, who informed him that because of the number of stab wounds Pearce had sustained a plea of self-defence - which is an absolute defence - was destined to fail. This was based upon a misreading of a pathologist’s report. It did list six wounds, but said that only two of them were the result of the blade. The rest were superficial and caused when Pearce fell on to broken glass.	Pearce received the wounds before he fell down, so all of them were inflicted by Ram.
At the trial, a whole series of Asian witnesses, who could have supported Satpal’s version of events, were never called. The evidence of the one who did take the stand was dismissed because his broken English could not readily be understood. No translator was employed.	There were no such witnesses. The witness who spoke in broken English was a witness for the prosecution who was actually able to give a statement in fluent English to the police.
At one point the judge told the jury he would translate, even though he did not speak Bengali.	Does this sound even faintly plausible?

In the whole list there is only case where it is clear that someone was convicted after defending himself. That is the case of Shannon whose conviction was reversed on appeal. But that was back in 1980 and the appeal set a precedent so that it would not happen again.

Finally we turn to Brett Osborn. Baker claims that this is a case of the government prosecuting someone for an obvious case of self defence. Like all the killers who were convicted he stabbed the victim in the back. This doesn’t sound he was defending himself, but there were others present so he could have been defending them; we just don’t know for sure. In any event, it certainly isn’t an obvious case of self-defence. In this case we don’t know what the jury thought of the evidence because Osborn chose to plead guilty to manslaughter. Why?

Osborn decided that he could not face the risk of life imprisonment. “You see it in the paper,” Osborn has said, “that bloke Tony Martin who shot the kid who was burgling his house. He went to prison for years.

The law and the results of the cases seem clear. Self-defence in Britain is lawful. There may be some chilling effect on people because of fear of being convicted for self-defence, but the people responsible for that are on Baker’s side of the question.

05:07 | /guns/UK | 6 comments | link

The cover story in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald is Paul “Magic Water” Sheehan’s review of Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t opening in Australia until July 29, and Sheehan appears not to have seen it. So how does he write the review? Easy—he cuts and pastes from reviews by other people. Here is Sheehan:

Perhaps the most egregious factual error is the bald and absurd claim that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked, killed or even threatened any American.

Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.

MOORE: On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush and the United States military invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. A nation that had never attacked the United States. A nation that had never threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen.

Who knows—maybe Hitch even believed his characterization when he penned it for Slate two weeks back. By this week, of course, he’d had time to check, and we saw him make this same claim Monday night.

Update: Professor Bunyip often writes about plagiarism in Australian papers. For example, here he suggests that Philip Adams is guilty of plagiarism. Bunyip’s verdict on Sheehan? Not guilty! And Bunyip isn’t dismissing the charge because Sheehan is a fellow RWDB, no sir. Apparently Sheehan was drummed out of the RWDB brigade because he opposed the war on Iraq and even a 3000 word rant attacking Michael Moore isn’t enough for readmission. No, to be let back in, Sheehan’s going to have to support the invasion of Iran which is apparently scheduled to occur after the election. (Where are the armies for this coming from? I guess the plan is to turn in the three horseman cards the coalition holds.)

Now lifting one sentence is pretty minor and my students would get off with a warning for doing such thing. What makes this more serious is that the sentence Sheehan lifted was a fabrication—Moore didn’t say what Hitchens claimed. And by stealing it, Sheehan took ownership of the fabrication.

Update 2: If you want to read a review of Fahrenheit 9/11 from someone who has actually seen it, I recommend Bob Somerby.

19:10 | /politics | 31 comments | link

Mann, Bradley and Hughes have published some corrections to the supplementary information for the famous hockey stick graph showing the temperature record of the last 1000 years. They say that the errors do not affect their published results. This could explain why McKitrick and McIntyre could not reproduce their results, but McKitrick is continuing to insist that Mann’s graph is wrong.

McKitrick has also published some errata. Unlike Mann’s error McKitrick’s error affects his results:

Figure 3 in the Cooler Heads Briefing on TBS contains an error. Tim Lambert of Australia has pointed out that missing data were handled differently between Figures 2 and 3, and when this is fixed the example no longer illustrates the intended point. The point (that the trend can change if the averaging rule is changed) is shown in this Revised Spreadsheet. Our thanks to Tim Lambert for pointing out the error.

I looked at his revised spreadsheet. This time he has dealt with missing values consistently and it does indeed show a warming trend when the usual arithmetic mean is used and a cooling trend when their unusual root-mean square is used. So how did he manage this? After all, as I showed in my earlier post, the root-mean square in Kelvins gives almost he same answer as the regular average. Well, McKitrick invented his own temperature scale. McKitrick modestly did not give it a name, but I am dubbing it the McKitrick scale in honour of its creator. To help you gain familiarity with this new scale, the form below lets you convert between degrees McKitrick and the old-fashioned degrees Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit. Just type a number into any of the boxes and press “Enter”.

Anyway, in his revised spreadsheet McKitrick takes the root-mean-square average of temperatures measured in degrees McKitrick. This way of averaging temperatures gives some rather odd results. For example, the RMS average of -10°M and -10°M is not -10°M as you might expect, but +10°M. Needless to say no-one actually uses RMS averages of temperatures in the McKitrick or any other scale, and no-one in their right mind would use them.

So revising their original example to use degrees McKitrick means the trend is different for different averaging methods? Well, no. If you take their original example and use the root-mean-square-in-degrees-McKitrick average, you still get the same trend. In the revised spreadsheet McKitrick has also changed the set of weather stations used. Even then it makes little difference to the size of trend—it changes an insignificant warming trend to an insignificant cooling trend.

To summarize: even if you use a weird root-mean-square-in-degrees-McKitrick average it makes little difference to the size of any warming or cooling trend you might see.

03:55 | /science | 7 comments | link

After reviving my first ever online post. I’ve dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian:

Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the “non-violent peace loving” European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below such countries as Australia (90.82), West Germany (77.49), New Zealand (65.73), Netherlands (56.00), Scotland (44.69), Denmark (41.06), Sweden (40.52), Austria (30.42).

Gee, it must be the USA system of mandatory penis registration & control that accounts for our per capita rate of rape being about 25% of that of Australia.

On Nov 4, 1991, I replied:

Phil, comparing crime rates between different countries is notoriously difficult, because of differences in the definition of crimes, reporting rates, police recording procedures, and so on.

I looked up some crime statistics in “The Size of the Crime Problem in Australia” by Mukherjee and Dagger, published by the Australian Institute of Criminology and found the following:

[figures for sexual assault] cannot therefore by compared between states with any validity at all.

So, comparing countries is even less valid.

Anyway, the rate for sexual assault in 1988 was 55 (per 100,000 population). I’d by interested in hearing in hearing where on earth you got your 90 figure. Sexual assualt includes rape, attempted rape, assualt with intent to rape, and indecent exposure. The only numbers I could find for the rape were for 1976—6.6. I could make some crack about the rate being 25% of that in the USA, but I hope I’ve convinced you how stupid that would be.

I’m afraid that people are still making the same mistake as Ronzone. Howard “Worst defence of Lott ever” Nemerov has an article purporting to show that the 1996 gun ban in Australia caused a dramatic rise in violent crime. Nemerov writes:

Following are selected comparisons for violent crime rates per 100,000 people in 2001. While homicide is lower and robbery is similar, assault and rape occur more than twice as often in Australia, proving that when the physically weaker are barred from possessing the best tool for self-defense, they are rendered helpless. As with England, women pay the price when politicians use tragedy as an excuse to eliminate armed threat to their power.

Homicide:	AUS - 1.8	US - 5.6
Assault:	AUS - 779	US - 319
Rape:	AUS - 86	US - 32
Robbery:	AUS - 136	US - 146

However, the rate he gives for rape in Australia is not for rape but for sexual assault. And the rate he gives for assault in the US is not for assault, but for aggravated assault. The rates in Australia are lower for both of the comparable crime categories. And Nemerov used rates from 2001, even though rates from 2002 are available. Most rates didn’t change, except that the robbery rate in Australia dropped to 106. Nemerov blames any increase in crime rates in Australia on the gun laws, will he credit the gun laws with causing this decrease?

02:47 | /guns/Australia | Add the first comment | link