Harvard Study On Guns, Summary

6. A summary of the evidence on guns and violent death

This book chapter summarizes the scientific literature on the relationship between gun prevalence (levels of household gun ownership) and suicide, homicide and unintentional firearm death and concludes that where there are higher levels of gun ownership, there are more gun suicides and more total suicides, more gun homicides and more total homicides, and more accidental gun deaths. (bolding and italics added for emphasis).

This is the first chapter in the book and provides and up-to-date and readable summary of the literature on the relationship between guns and death. It also adds to the literature by using the National Violent Death Reporting System data to show where (home or away) the shootings occurred. Suicides for all age groups and homicides for children and aging adults most often occurred in their own home.

Miller M, Azrael D, Hemenway D. Firearms and violence death in the United States. In: Webster DW, Vernick JS, eds. Reducing Gun Violence in America. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Link: 

Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center | Harvard

Harvard Study On Guns V

5. More guns = more homicides of police

This article examines homicide rates of Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) from 1996 to 2010. Differences in rates of homicides of LEOs across states are best explained not by differences in crime, but by differences in household gun ownership. In high gun states, LEOs are 3 times more likely to be murdered than LEOs working in low-gun states.

This article was cited by President Obama in a speech to a police association. This article will hopefully bring police further into the camp of those pushing for sensible gun laws.

Swedler DI, Simmons MM, Dominici F, Hemenway D. Firearm prevalence and homicides of law enforcement officers in the United States. American Journal of Public Health. 2015; 105:2042-48.

Link: 

Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center | Harvard

Harvard Study On Guns IV

4. Across states, more guns = more homicide (2)

Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64.

Link: 

Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center | Harvard

Harvard Study On Guns III

3. Across states, more guns = more homicide

Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten-year period (1988-1997).

After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997. American Journal of Public Health. 2002; 92:1988-1993

Link: 

Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center | Harvard

Harvard Study On Guns II

2. Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide

We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.

Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49:985-88.

Link: 

Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center | Harvard

Harvard Study On Guns I

1. Where there are more guns there is more homicide (literature review)

Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at a higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal. 2004; 9:417-40.

Link: 

Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center | Harvard

Yeehaw and Yahoo! Kansas and gunz! in the news today

Launch media viewer

Wichita City Hall, which already had metal detectors and security, is one of the few public buildings in the city where concealed weapons will still be banned. 

Yessirree, Bob! Good old wild, wild West Kansas is in none other than the New York Times today and if it isn't on slashing education funding, well then, it must be on gunz in that state and what a good idea they are:

Keeping Public Buildings Free of Guns Proves Too Costly for Kansas Towns

It seems the Kansas Republican legislature screwed over their own populace by making it EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE to NOT allow guns in public spaces, all the time, everywhere:

WICHITA, Kan. — Reasoning that more guns mean greater safety, Kansas lawmakers voted last year to require cities and counties to make public buildings accessible to people legally carrying concealed weapons.

But for communities that remained wary of such open access to city halls, libraries, museums and courthouses, the Legislature provided an exemption: Guns can be banned as long as local governments pay for protections like metal detectors and security guards, ensuring the safety of those they have disarmed.

It turns out that in Wichita, the state’s most populous city, and in some other towns, the cost of opting out before the Jan. 1 deadline was just too high.

“It was essentially being foisted upon us,” said Janet Miller, a City Council member in Wichita. The city applied over the summer for a six month exemption but voted last month not to extend it after the police estimated that it would cost $14 million a year to restrict guns in all 107 city-owned buildings.

While Republican-majority legislatures across the country are easing restrictions on gun owners, few states are putting more pressure on municipalities right now than Kansas. The new law has forced some local  leaders to weigh policy conviction against fiscal pragmatism in a choice that critics say was flawed from the start: Open vulnerable locations to concealed side arms or stretch meager budgets to cover the extra security
measures.

The ignorance, callousness and even stupidity of this is nearly mind-numbing for anyone who cares more about lives than the presence and/or ownership of weapons.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why, as we all intuitively know:

More Guns = More Killing

It only stands to reason. It's logic.  Well, it's logic to everyone except weapons-all-the-time-and-everywhere supporters. Statistics and research (you know, that scientific stuff?) show it, time and again, across the world, yes, but even in studies in the US, from state to state:

Link between rates of gun ownership and homicides

Homicide - Harvard School of Public Health

And get this, even Kansans are against this lunacy:

According to a poll last year by Fort Hays State University, about 56 percent of Kansans strongly or somewhat opposed allowing concealed firearms in schools, hospitals and government buildings.

So to heck with what Kansans even think or feel or want, the Republican legislature is going to shove guns on them everywhere, for everyone, representative government be damned.

I fully expected their own--I mean, our own--Kansas state capitol building to be exempt from this ban but no, they took their commitments to insanity there, as well, I found:

Kansas Lawmakers Vote To Allow Guns In State Capitol

What they lack in common sense and intelligence, at least they try to make up for with consistency.  Consistently stupid and irresponsible.

So thank you, very Republican Governor Sam "Slasher" Brownback and the very Republican statehouse. Once again, foisting things on the Kansas public Kansans don't even want, like additional tax breaks for the already-wealthy and corporations, heavy and copious tax increases for and on the backs of the middle- and lower-classes and--again, yahoo!--deep cuts to the education system.

Yeehaw, indeed, Kansas.  Giddyup.  The new state slogan:  Kansas, forward!  Into the 19th Century!

The value of great teachers

There was an article I nearly covered a few days ago--Sunday--in The New York Times that told of the high value of good teachers on children and the great effects they can have. I thought it so self-evident that I didn't write about it. Now comes a column from The Times' own Nicholas Kristof, expanding on it: The Value of Teachers "...a landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime — or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class — all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn. The study, by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities, finds that if a great teacher is leaving, parents should hold bake sales or pass the hat around in hopes of collectively offering the teacher as much as a $100,000 bonus to stay for an extra year. Sure, that’s implausible — but their children would gain a benefit that far exceeds even that sum." That is, if the parent is involved. And if the parent cares about their child. And their child's success. Links: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/opinion/kristof-the-value-of-teachers.html; http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html?scp=2&sq=teachers&st=cse;

In the face of all this negativity

It seems as though everyone is focusing on all the bad things that are happening either to or in the US--or both--or in the world and everyone assumes we're all going "to heck in a handbasket", as it were. So kudos and salutations to Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times to point out the things going right and well in the world: Are We Getting Nicer? 'It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.' So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries. War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer. That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called 'The Better Angels of Our Nature,' and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. 'Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,' Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.'” So, this Thanksgiving, before you or your brother-in-law or whomever starts lamenting that we're going down the tubes, forward him to this fact-filled, history-drawn column. Maybe it will shut him up. Maybe it will give us all pause. And hope. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opinion/kristof-are-we-getting-nicer.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share&pagewanted=print

Quote of the day

"Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? 'I'm not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I'm just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I'd like to cut your chest open.' The crowd cheers." —Tina Fey, writing in her book, Bossypants

And happy birthday today to Ms. Fey who turns 41.

A long-overdue first in America--and with a local touch, too

There is a fascinating article in the first section of The New York Times Sunday, pointing out that the US is finally getting one college in the country--one--that will offer a major in Secularism.


I found that stunning.


One college or university in the entire country.


It is Pitzer College in Southern California--Orange County.  It's part of the Claremont College group.


One college or university in the entire country that has a major in Secularism.


Not one at Harvard or Yale or any Ivy League school.  No where.


Ignorance, it seems, is bliss.


I assume no faculty dared advance such an idea, for fear of an uproar from any local or national religious groups.


From the article:


Colleges and universities have long offered majors in religion or theology. But with more and more people now saying they have no religion, one college has decided to be the first to offer a major in secularism.


Starting this fall, Pitzer College, a small liberal arts institution in Southern California, will inaugurate a department of secular studies. Professors from other departments, including history, philosophy, religion, science and sociology, will teach courses like “God, Darwin and Design in America,” “Anxiety in the Age of Reason” and “Bible as Literature.”


The department was proposed by Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, who describes himself as “culturally Jewish, but agnostic-atheist on questions of deep mystery.” Over the years he grew increasingly intrigued by the growth of secularism in the United States and around the world. He studied and taught in Denmark, one of the world’s most secular countries, and has written several books about atheism.


Studying nonbelief is as valid as studying belief, Mr. Zuckerman said, and the new major will make that very clear.


I thought this important, too:


“It’s not about arguing ‘Is there a God or not?’ ” Mr. Zuckerman said. “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people — Czechs, Scandinavians — now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.


“It has not been studied,” he added.


So good on Mr. Zuckerman and Pitzer College.  This should be studied and, as I said in the title, it's long overdue.


Now, for the local link:


Mr. Zuckerman said he immediately heard from three students interested in the major. One of them was Kiley Lawrence, a freshman from Mission Hills, Kan., and a pre-med student at Scripps College, one of the seven Claremont Colleges.


Ms. Lawrence attended an Episcopal school through eighth grade and was well versed in the Bible, but she said she became a skeptic early on. Now she plans to declare a double major in biophysics and secular studies, because, she said, “each enhances the other.”


Ms. Lawrence, 19, said, “I feel as though I’m being included in something really exciting and innovative, and perhaps even historic.”


And good on you, Ms. Lawrence.  Pave the way for the future.


Links:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/us/08secular.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=us
http://www.pitzer.edu/

The Donald wants to be taken seriously?

No solutions for how to best steer the country, just questions about this president:

New York--President Obama may have released his birth certificate on Wednesday, but Donald Trump and other wingnuts have already moved on to a new conspiracy: how the president got into the Ivy League. Michelle Goldberg traces the far-right history of the claim.

The birther bit must have been getting old. Now Donald Trump has opened up a new line of attack on President Obama, accusing him of being a “terrible student” who shouldn’t have gotten into Columbia University or Harvard Law School. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” he asked the Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.” He continued darkly, “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

That is just sad.  Desperate.  Pathetic.

Not content there, apparently he's also possibly looking into the ultra-right-wing website WorldNetDaily, which ran a 2009 piece asking, “Did radical Muslims help send Obama to Harvard?”

I love the way Ms. Goldberg so correctly puts this:  Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

So, anyone call the people who raise this racist?

First, they'd get a "Who, me?!"

And then they'll be chided, harshly, for playing the "race card."

This is no way to screen people for the highest office in the land.

Next stop for the Winkelvoss twins? Lampooning on SNL

Did you see the latest news out today on the two Harvard Winkelvoss twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg for ownership of Facebook?  You can't miss it:

   Court: Harvard twins stuck with Facebook agreement

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court ruled Monday that former Harvard University schoolmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg can't undo their settlement over creation of the social networking site.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Monday that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were savvy enough to understand what they were agreeing to when they signed the agreement in 2008. 

Here's the main thrust that will get them lampooned (I mean, besides the fact that they're East coast all the way, tall, dark and handsome and went to Harvard.  Other than that...):

The deal called for a $20 million cash payment and a partial ownership of Facebook. 

I mean, come on.  This has SNL all over it:

"Waaaaahhhhhh... Twenty million dollars isn't enough!!!"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This one writes itself.

Even the name.  I'm sorry, WINKELVOSS?

The writers won't even have to get out of bed for this one, they'll be able to phone this one in.

Links:  http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/court-harvard-twins-stuck-with-facebook-agreement

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/

An important read on newspapers

I recommend you go to the following link to a New York Times article on why we need newspapers and why it's important they not all disappear, especially, city to city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Evans-t.html

They really are, in their best incarnation, the "fourth estate". In that best situation, they are a check on government--local, city, state, federal, everything.

If newspapers aren't there to do the "bigger picture" information-gathering and reporting, who is?

Also, there is that "local identity" that comes from bringing us all together, with that same information and events.

For cities like Kansas City and St. Paul/Minneapolis, for instance, we are even more dependent on them for a sense of the entire area.

And then there are the larger metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and, yes, New York, etc., that need both that information and cohesion that, I think, only a newspaper can bring.

After the 8 years of Constitution and law-breaking we got from George W. Bush, it seems all the more obvious that we need a vigilant and independent newspaper system, in specific, but media, in general.

That on top of the fact that the corporations and big business have gotten into skewing the news to their own benefits.

It's a scary world out there, folks.

Without good, searching and reporting media, it's going to get a lot scarier.

Ironically, sadly, frustratingly, the one thing I think that can save a newspaper is supporting the reporters, researchers and writers so they can and do get the good, hard-hitting stories readers can expect and look forward to. That is the opposite of what has happened here, in Kansas City, with our own newspaper. It's been weakened and shrunken mightily.

If newspapers don't do good reporting and writing, particularly now, with the advent of the computer and blogs and what not, what purpose do they serve?

Kansas City Star?