GE Morton wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2019, 7:27 pm
The question, as phrased in the thread title, is poorly worded, making it ambiguous. Is it asking whether an individual is more likely to commit a violent crime if he legally owns a gun, or whether violent crimes are more likely in a community when guns are legally owned? Those two questions are not necessarily correlated, because in a community where guns may be legally owned
by some people, others may possess them illegally, and use them to commit crimes.
Due to the character limit, the titular question is only a summary of the question. The full question is in the following paragraph in the OP:
Scott wrote: ↑March 20th, 2019, 10:18 amDoes legally owning a gun correlate to a significant difference in the statistical likelihood of the gun owner committing violent crime? If so, does the evidence provided only provide evidence of
correlation or does it provide evidence (even if weak evidence) of
causality? Does the evidence provided strongly indicate a true correlation with actually committing violent crime or (more likely) only provide a correlation between gun ownership and being charged and/or convicted of violent crime? For what factors do the studies control (e.g. income, race, gender, age, etc.)? Keep in mind, any uncontrolled factors in a correlation study could be the true causal link leading to the thus relatively meaningless non-causal correlation.
I do think that question is more in referring to individual ownership.
GE Morton wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2019, 7:27 pm
Scott wrote: ↑March 20th, 2019, 10:18 am
Does legally owning a gun correlate to a significant difference in the statistical likelihood of the gun owner committing violent crime?
The answer to this version of the question is also "Yes." Persons considering committing certain crimes will be more likely to commit them if they have a gun, whether legally or illegally. Guns make some crimes feasible that would be infeasible, or too risky, without them.
Your argument would apply if the question was whether gun ownership in general (whether legal or illegal) correlated with committing crimes. However, for the question at hand, your argument is a
strawman argument.
GE Morton wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2019, 7:27 pmThe second problem is with asking for a correlation between gun ownership and "violent crime." Not all violent crimes are committed with guns, and it is not clear what gun ownership rates have to do with violent crimes committed with fists, tire irons, or baseball bats.
I believe the above line of reasoning puts the cart before the horse. Correlative data can be calculated without first explaining why the hypothetical correlation exists or not. If you can't imagine what factors could possibly correlate eating ice cream and murder, or think the connection is unclear, or think what ice cream has to do with murder is unclear, then indeed you might be surprised if the data shows a correlation or be unsurprised if the data doesn't show a correlation. But to give your hypothetical surprise/unsurprise at yet-to-be-revealed data is putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion.
Too often we humans try to find data to match our expectations instead of vice versa. I believe that's a key difference between reason versus rationalization.
Nonetheless, there's countless possible ways legal gun ownership can be correlated to the owner committing more or less violent crime. It could be that people who are more prone to violence in general are more attracted to guns, shooting, hunting, and gun ownership, which could lead to a positive correlation. It could be that people who choose to obey gun laws are more prone to law abiding in general than the average person which could lead to a negative correlation. It could be that those who are anti-social or have personality disorders or are prone to violence are less able to stick it out and pass the required basic training classes that many states/countries have as a prerequisite to obtaining gun permits. Those are just a few small examples of the many countless possible factors at play. Only the overall data will show the true net correlation. Correlations are relatively easy to study statistically. A confidence-inspiring answer would involve checking and finding matching data from many different states, countries, and jurisdictions, using many different separate studies with varying methodologies. If there is not consensus among the data, then that itself may indicate the lack of a strong overall correlation one way or the other, or may indicate a null answer (i.e. we can't reasonably answer the question at all because the data is too conflicting).
Felix wrote: ↑March 24th, 2019, 5:56 am
"Is legally owning a gun correlated to different likelihood of committing violent crime?"
I don't understand the question... a different likelihood compared to what, not owning a gun?
Here is the full question from the OP:
Scott wrote:Does legally owning a gun correlate to a significant difference in the statistical likelihood of the gun owner committing violent crime? If so, does the evidence provided only provide evidence of correlation or does it provide evidence (even if weak evidence) of causality? Does the evidence provided strongly indicate a true correlation with actually committing violent crime or (more likely) only provide a correlation between gun ownership and being charged and/or convicted of violent crime? For what factors do the studies control (e.g. income, race, gender, age, etc.)? Keep in mind, any uncontrolled factors in a correlation study could be the true causal link leading to the thus relatively meaningless non-causal correlation.
To be clear, the question I'm asking is about whether legal gun ownership correlates to the gun owner being more or less likely to commit violent crime than the general population (excluding the legal gun owners themselves). In other words, we are comparing them not only to those who don't own a gun but also those who illegally own a gun.
For example, image a pretend Island on which a third of the people own a gun legally, a third own a gun illegally, and a third don't own a gun at all. Now imagine 10 violent crimes are committed on the island. Imagine, illegal gun owners commit 4 of those crimes, legal gun owners commit 3, and non-gun-owners commit 3.
It would be true that 70% of the crimes on the imaginary island are committed by gun owners. It would be true that gun ownership in general is correlated to committing violent crime at higher rate on the imaginary island. Yet, it would also be true that legal gun ownership was correlated with committing less violent crime than the general population (33.3% population would be gun owners but they only commit 30% of the violent crimes).
Those numbers are hypothetical on an imaginary island. But they show that the correlation one way or the other of legal gun ownership to the commission of violent crime is not at all evidenced by checking what percentage of crimes are committed by guns in general or by what percentage of people own guns.
So the question is simply what is the actual data on this question. What are the actual stats regarding the correlation of legal gun ownership to the commission of violent crime by the gun owner. Namely, what is the ratio between (a) the percentage of the population in any given area that legally owns guns versus (b) the percentage of the population in that area that commits violent crime? Is the ratio greater than, less than, or roughly equal to 1. It is basic correlation statistics.
Felix wrote: ↑March 25th, 2019, 6:15 pmObviously if you group together those who don't own guns with those who own guns illegally, Scott's question becomes irrelevant.
Irrelevant to what?
What's the relevance to the forum topic of talking about the alleged irrelevance of the forum topic to some other thing?