Specifically, I need a copy of Firearm Ownership and Domestic Versus Nondomestic Homicide in the U.S., Kivisto et al 2019, or a nonpaywalled link.
Added: And I finally found it. Looks like I’ll be going over it today.
The paper purports to find a definite link between domestic firearms homicide and firearms ownership. However, without seeing the whole paper and supplemental material, I’m inclined to doubt this link.
Let’s start with the results.
State-level firearm ownership was uniquely associated with domestic (incidence rate ratio=1.013, 95% CI=1.008, 1.018) but not nondomestic (incidence rate ratio=1.002, 95% CI=0.996, 1.008) firearm homicide rates, and this pattern held for both male and female victims.
When you have to run your ratio out to three decimal places, I begin to wonder, unless you’re modeling statistical quantum interactions between elementary particles. Shouldn’t need to be done with a few thousand documented events. When your 95% confidence intervals overlap, I really wonder if the “difference” is merely statistical noise.
But, again without seeing the data, I see more problems in the methods sections
Firearm ownership was examined using a validated proxy measure and homicide rates came from the Supplemental Homicide Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports.
What “validated proxy measure” of firearms ownership? I’ve recently seen both the General Social Survey and YouGov.com used. Other estimates range from 45,000,000 gun owners to — seen this past Monday morning — 124,000,000. CBS actually estimated ownership by registered NFA items, not quite comprehending that’s not a proxy for states that don’t allow NFA items to be possessed.
You think a range like that might throw off incidence ratios a bit?
The next problem is that “homicide rates came from the Supplemental Homicide Reports” part. You might get the impression they got domestic firearms homicide numbers from the UCR. I don’t think so.
I’ve never been able to find a UCR table that broke that out. So what I think they did was “estimate” what percentage of firearms homicides (which are reported) were “domestic.” That’s another element of uncertainty.
Frankly, if one could reliably estimate firearms ownership, I would expect more domestic and nondomestic firearms deaths with more ownership, for much the same reason that a place with more cars per capita is likely to see more car crashes. But I can’t figure out what “data” they used to prove it.
This has the feel of just another anti-rights hit piece. But if Kivisto can show they used hard data and models somewhat more accurate than a kindergartener’s Play-Do sculpture, I’ll apologize.
If someone really wants to compare gun ownership to domestic firearms incidents, I’ll explain how to go about it.
Don’t make up estimates based on anonymous phone surveys.* Select just states with handgun registration (long guns are a small enough percentage of murder weapons to disregard for this). That ignores unlawful possession, but it’s something.
In those states, go to the state courts for domestic violence conviction records, and sort for those involving firearms. You want both fatal and nonfatal. Using fatal alone doesn’t tell you how often they happen, and incidents could be masked by good medical care or poor aim. You want convictions to weed out good self-defense cases, because some otherwise helpless woman eliminating a thuggish “boyfriend” who thinks trying to kill her is justifiable pest control and a good thing.
Graph each state, incidents on the X axis, ownership on the Y.
If you really want to drill down into the data, look at the convictions and see how often the weapons were lawfully possessed (i.e.- were unlawful possession charges present). (I’ll give you a hint: over 90% of crime guns used — per inmate surveys for decades — were unlawfully possessed.)
Now you can compare lawful firearms possession to domestic firearms homicides.
But wait, as Ron Popeil would say, there’s more.
Look up nonfirearm domestic homicides for those states, and compare that to ownership. Now you’ll see whether, as some suggest, people without guns simply kill with something else. Or maybe they just declare, “Aw, heck; I don’t have a gun. Guess I won’t do anything about you sassing me. Ain’t like I could beatcha to death with a skillet.”
* Anonymous phone surveys on ownership of politically incorrect tools are unreliable. Those disinclined to tell faceless pollsters what easily stolen goods they have often don’t answer the phone. Or they lie. After all, was that really the University of Chicago doing the GSS by wardialing pseudorandom phone numbers? The ATF with a list of potential investigatees? Or merely a burglar pre-casing the neighborhood? Caller ID is so easily spoofed.
Even if you got a gun ownership question into the oh-so-reliable American Community Survey… Let me tell you about the guy who answered those snoopy questions…
By filling it out as his D&D player character. Castel with suites, ballroom, feasting hall, jakes, stables; you get the idea. People in the home? Domestic retainers and soldiers. Commute time? Those quests can range for hundreds of miles.
Or all the crazy cat people listing their pets as children.
[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]
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