Homicide Statistics Bias by Gun Politics

A recent email I was forwarded, contained a list of Homicides/100,000 citizens for many countries around the world.  The email subject was "Eye Opener" and began with the title "World Murder Statistics".  What followed was a list of 109 Countries, with Honduras at the top of the list with 91.6 Homicides / 100,000.  Last on this list was the USA with 4.2 Homicides / 100,000 citizens.  The email ended with this statement:

 "ALL the countries (109) above America have 100% gun bans. It might be of interest to note that SWITZERLAND (not shown on this list)has NO MURDER OCCURRENCE!However, SWITZERLAND'S law requires that EVERYONE....

1. Own a Gun
2. Maintain Marksman qualifications....regularly
3. "Carry"........a Weapon."

As has been my habit when I see a list of numbers, I first went to the source of the data to confirm what I saw in the email.  Indeed, there is data supplied by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which is different than the email's claimed source of the World Health Organization.  The following links will take you to these data summarized in an active table, but on these sites there are links to the complete data set from the UNODC which I downloaded and found to be the same as these links.

List of countries byIntentional Homicides / 100,000 Inhabitants

List of countries by firearm-related death rate per 100,000 inhabitants 

List of countries by gun ownership rate per 100 inhabitants

I first began to understand the "109 countries above America" and what this meant.  In order to find the Honduras rate of 91.6,  the email was referencing Intentional Homicide data.  All the data in the email were correct for all countries EXCEPT America!  The email stated that the United States rate was 4.2 / 100,000 but from the UNODC data set, the United States rate was 4.8.  In addition, there were 102 countries with rates higher than the US (not 109) and, not stated in the email, 104 countries with Homicide Rates LESS than the US.

In order to understand if all 102 (109) countries with rates worse that the US indeed had "gun bans", I utilized Gun Politics  for more information.  In summary, I could not find any country with a "100% ban" on guns.  However, many of these countries do indeed have stronger gun restrictions, but in these cases there are ways to obtain and possess a gun.  But to be clear, there are an equal number of countries with Homicide Rates LESS than the US that have more restrictive gun laws than the US.  So, it appears that restrictive gun laws do not seem to predict Homicide Rates.  But to test this I did download Gun Ownership data to correlate to Homicides which I will cover later.

Now, I wanted to investigate the comments about Switzerland! The statement that they have "no murder occurrance" is not accurate.  In fact, on this same list their Homicide Rate is 0.7 with 15 countries lower than Switzerland.  And finally, gun control in Switzerland is based on a militia concept as seen from this quote from Gun Politics.

Switzerland practices universal conscription, which requires that all able-bodied male citizens keep fully automatic firearms at home in case of a call-up. Every male between the ages of 20 and 34 is considered a candidate for conscription into the military, and following a brief period of active duty will commonly be enrolled in the militia until age or an inability to serve ends his service obligation.^[76] During their enrollment in the armed forces, these men are required to keep their government-issued selective fire combat rifles and semi-automatic handguns in their homes.^[77] They are not allowed to keep ammunition for these firearms in their homes, however, and ammunition is stored at government arsenals. Up until September 2007, soldiers received 50 rounds of government-issued ammunition in a sealed box for storage at home.^[78] Swiss gun laws are considered to be restrictive.^[79] 

So this law does not apply to everyone, but only to males.  They are required to keep a gun in the home for immediate call up to the militia (after serving in the armed forces) and does not mention anything about "carrying" a gun.  The marksmanship requirement I could not find either.  However, the most interesting fact was left out of the email.  Although required to keep the firearm at home, THEY HAVE NO AMMUNITION AT HOME!  All of it is stored in government run arsenals!  No wonder the death rate is so low!  Guns at home without ammo.

Now, moving on the actual data.  First I thought it interesting that this email used Homicide Rates by all methods.  There is a database of Homicide by Firearms by the UNODC which I found and began to look at relative to guns/firearms.  This database has fewer countries participating but there are still 70.

Applying statistics to all these lists, I was first interested in statistical differences between lower and higher rates.  I evaluated this using control charts with limits based on population sigma since the data were not time ordered, just alphabetical.  First we will look at Gun Ownership per 100 Residents.

The X chart at the top, clearly shows only one outlier country which is the US!  All other countries are within the normal range of per capita ownership.  This is probably not new news to most of you.

Next I looked at Homicide by Firearm Rates for Total, Homicide and Suicide.

There are two countries outside the upper limit signifying outside the "norm" for Total Firearm Homicides.  These two countries are El Salvador and Honduras.  If we take the 95% confidence (2 sigma), Columbia, Guatemala, and Sweden could also be considered outside the norm.  Switzerland is considered to have less restrictive gun laws, but Honduras more restrictive.

For Firearm Homicide Rates, the two outliers are Guatemala and Hungary,  At 95% confidence, add El Salvador, Honduras, Japan and Sweden.  Japan is considered to have more restrictive gun laws than the US.

Finally, the Firearm Suicide Rate shows Netherlands and Zimbabwe to be uniquely high.  Netherlands is considered to be more restrictive in their gun laws.

I could not find any correlations between gun ownership per 100 inhabitants and any of the firearm rates as seen below:

As you can see, between the two graphs, there is a small white box with a -2.8 which means the correlation is non existent and all others even weaker!  The number of guns don't correlate to any of the firearm death rates so I would conclude that other factors, including culture are more important.

My takeaway from this closer look at the email and the corresponding data is the culture of guns and gun politics has very little to do with firearm homicides and suicides.  It is time for the different groups battling over gun laws to take a new direction to make their respective cases!