Voodoo Statistics:
How HCI whips up Fear of an Increasing Problem While Taking Credit for Decreasing It

by dischord
(redistribution permitted and encouraged)

It should come as no surprise in a nation of toddler attention spans that the gun control movement is getting away with statistical voodoo. So gullible are the American people, it seems, that they are believing both the idea that there?s an increasing ?gun crisis? but that the gun control movement deserves credit for decreasing the very same supposed ?problem.?

Go to Handgun Control Inc?s essay ?Kids and Guns?
(http://www.handguncontrol.com/ib/kidsnguns.asp). It mentions Columbine, so we know it was written, or at least updated, in 1999 or 2000.

Note especially these two sentences: ?From 1984 to 1994 the firearm death rate for 15-19 year olds increased 222% while the non-firearm homicide death rate decreased almost 13%. Within five years, firearms are expected to overtake motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death among American children.?

First of all, the idea that annual gun deaths will surpass annual car deaths is rooted in a 1991 Centers for Disease Control prediction about this occurring in 2003. Predictions of trends 12 years in the future are notoriously invalid, and we?ll get to how that?s playing out in a moment. Meanwhile, since the prediction is rooted in CDC numbers, we?ll look at CDC numbers.

According to 1984-1994 CDC numbers http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/default.htm), gun *deaths* (HCI?s words) for 15-19s increased 110%, while gun *homicides* increased 205%. But by no stretch of the imagination did gun deaths (homicide or otherwise) increase by 222%. HCI seems to be either exaggerating by 17% or doubling the increase.

In any event, due to the Columbine reference, we know this is a relatively up to date document, which begs the question as to why HCI stopped at 1994 while CDC numbers (available for the past year) run through 1997. Most likely it is because gun deaths peaked in 1994, and stopping there creates the biggest shock.

In fact, from 1994 to 1997, overall gun *deaths* for 15-19 year olds decreased by 28%, while gun *murders* fell by slightly more at 29%. Moreover, comparing 10 year trends (84-94 vs 94-04), if we project the 94-04 numbers out, there will be no ? zero ? gun deaths for teens in just four years. (Current drops in crime rates strongly suggest that such trends are continuing).

But as I noted, long term societal projections are notoriously faulty, which brings us to HCI?s claim about gun deaths ?for children? surpassing car deaths ?in five years.? First, we have to deal with the gun control movement?s penchant for stretching the definition of ?child,? so I?ll look at car and gun trends for two groups ? 0-14 year olds and 0-19 year olds.

For 0-14 year olds (1993-1997), car deaths decreased 5% per annum from 3,046 to 2,097. For the same group and period, gun deaths decreased 34% from 957 to 630.

For 0-19 year olds (1993-1997), car deaths actually increased 2% from 8,003 to 8,130, while gun deaths decreased 27% from 5,751 to 4,223.

Thus, while guns deaths are 1/3 or 1/2 the number of car deaths, they are decreasing at much greater rates. (The vastly lower numbers are decreasing faster.) Barring some extreme unforseen circumstances, the claim about guns surpassing cars for children is absurd.

This of course lead to the question of whether HCI is aware of the more recent CDC data ? are they simply lazy (updating for Columbine but not looking at the most recent data), or are they excluding facts to fit their agenda?

HCI, as a matter of fact, does know about the more recent trends. Go to their essay on the Brady Bill (http://www.handguncontrol.org/research/bradyred.html). There you?ll read about decreases in gun murders in the latter half of the 1990s.

Thus, it seems that when HCI wants to whip up fear, it looks at past trends and pretends they are current trends even though it knows ? and takes credit for ? the real current trends.

Ironically, while HCI takes credit for the ?Brady Bill,? it strongly opposed the version of the law currently on the books, which actually was written by it nemesis, the National Rifle Association. However, this cause-effect connection is not proven, as CDC, DOJ and FBI all take pains to point out in their discussions of late-1990s gun death.