Gun scholar John Lott suggests that the murder rate in Baghdad is lower than the murder rate in Washington DC. He explains why, and gives some convincing data to support his numbers and show that that numbers used by hysterical critics are vastly (and deliberately) inflated by up to 3000%.
This despite the fact that Iraqis can own machine guns, and are in the middle of a guerilla war.
Update:
Tim Lambert thinks Lott is full of it, but Mr. Lambert's analysis seems to leave a lot to be desired as well. For instance, he bases his numbers on the single month with the most gunshot deaths, rather than an average number. He also seems to think that every dead body ends up in the city morgue, which is nonsensical.
Anyway, in a city where residents routinely fire automatic weapons into the air to celebrate birthdays and soccer games, statistics about gunshot deaths alone won't get anyone very far in determining a murder rate.
"Anyway, in a city where residents routinely fire automatic weapons into the air to celebrate birthdays and soccer games, statistics about gunshot deaths alone won't get anyone very far in determining a murder rate."
Huh?
Bullets falling randomly from the sky and killing people doesn't count as "murder", so if you just look at deaths from bullet wounds you're going to count a lot of deaths that aren't relevant to the issue at hand. Plus, of course, suicides &c.
I read that the night Saddam was captured there were eight deaths caused by weapons fired into the air, and a few dozen injuries.
The real question remains:
Lott assumes that murders in Baghdad would be about 5% of all deaths, just like in DC.
He then takes this assumption, and goes on to prove that murders in Baghdad are about 5% of all deaths, just like in DC.
You link to this analysis approvingly.
I'm not sure I buy the view that falling bullets don't count as murder. Bullets don't just fall randomly from the sky; they were put there on purpose. While the idiot shooter may not know the precise terminal velocity of the bullets he is shooting, he surely knows that bullets, like rocks, can fall fast enough to seriously hurt someone. So if you can prove which shooter fired the fatal bullet, why not charge him with murder?
Regardless of how they are categorized, I don't think deaths by celebratory gunfire are likely to make any noticable dent in the murder rate, the death-by-gun rate, or anything else except the death-by-some-idiot-shooting-his-gun-in-the-air rate. Even the once-in-a-lifetime celebration of Saddam's capture resulted in "only" eight deaths, nationwide.
Actually, no Hipocrite [sic], he doesn't. The 5 per 100,000 figure comes from the U.S. Army 1st Division, not from any of Lott's projections. Did you even read the article, or did you just parrot Lambert's crap without attempting to verify it?
Hipo: Take a math course, possibly the kind where they introduce word problems.
Xrlq: Firing a gun into the air and killing someone seems like manslaughter to me, not murder. And eight deaths in one night is pretty significant, when we're only talking about a few hundred gunshot deaths per month. Anyway, this problem is solved by outlawing the firing of guns into the air, not by outlawing possession of guns, which is the real point of these statistics anyway.
xrlq: If you think something that I wrote is incorrect, then the way to advance the discussion is to say what it is and why you think it is wrong rather than keeping it a secret.
Michael: I am puzzled why you wrote that I thought that every dead body ended up in the morgue, when I quite specifically said the opposite.
The eight deaths in the one night is as atypical as can be imagined. Most nights people aren't celebrating the capture of Saddam. Can we use a little common sense here? It would be a very interesting story if half of the people dead from gunfire coming into the morgue every day were from "air bullets", but a dozen indepedent reports decribed the victims as having been murdered.
Tim: I read through your article again, and I must have misunderstood the point about the morgue before. Honestly, I'm too tired to follow all the numbers and the connections between your piece and Lott's piece tonight.
Lott's numbers seem to indicate that the number of murders in Baghdad is on the same order of magnitude as the number of murders in Washington, and that makes sense to me. If there are half as many or twice as many, it doesn't make much difference, I don't think.
Anyway, part of my position comes from the fact that I respect Lott much more than I respect the New York Times when it comes to these matters, so I'm relying on his authority as well as his numbers.
Tim: in your case, the "crap" to which I referred involved dwelling on the largely irrelevant fact that homicides don't necessarily make up the same percentage of deaths in D.C. and Baghdad. In "Hipocrite's," it involved taking that irrelevancy one step further, and claiming Lott used that assumption to make up Baghdad's homicide rate. The latter suggested that "Hipocrite" had barely skimmed your critique, and not looked at the original article at all.
Xlrq: Hipocrite seems to have understood what I said , while you don't seem to have read Lott's piece at all carefully. The "largely irrelevant fact" is in fact the basis of a key paragraph in his piece where he concludes, on entirely bogus grounds, that the morgue numbers overcount homicides by a factor of three to twenty.
Michael: The morgue numbers show that Baghdad has a much greater homicide rate than DC. The arguments Lott offers to discount the morgue numbers are completely ridiculous, as I already explained.
I think perhaps we are missing the point. the point seems to be that americans are not as pure and righteous as the govt. portrays. You must take into account that it is the people in d.c. that went to WAR in badhdad. killing will always be a bad thing. regardless of the number, war will never be justifiable, even war itself. but let us not judge, for the day of reckoning is comming for everybody sooner than we all think. so let there be love.
danman: Killing is always a bad thing, even in defense of yourself or your family? I think not. And wasn't WW2 worthwhile to destroy the Nazis?
I think the evidence is clear. More guns, okay more unregulated gun ownership = more violent deaths.
And you don't have to go to Baghdad to find out. Rio is the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere. The city also has the highest rate of gun ownership in the Western Hemisphere (or one of the highest).