Subscribe
The Daily Grind Video
CLOSE

The largest study of gun violence in the U.S. was released this past week, and it definitely confirmed some information we needed to know.

According to thinkprogress.org, the study was done by Professor Michael Siegel of Boston University, and will be featured in the  American Journal of Public Health.

The site reports:

Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.

No good data on national rates of gun ownership exist (partly because of the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress), so the authors used the percentage of suicides that involve a firearm (FS/S) as a proxy.

And here’s a super heart breaking outcome:

The theory, backed up by a wealth of data, is that the more guns there are any in any one place, the higher the percentage of people who commit suicide with guns as opposed to other mechanisms will be.

The study confirms that the ownership of guns in the U.S. is what has initially led to the increase of violence.

Surprise… surprise? NOT!

What do you guys think of the study?