Gun Audit

by David In the debate over guns and gun control, many types of evidence are put forward to support either side of the isles' arguments. People post studies, scatterplots, bar charts, etc. to support their arguments about why guns are good or bad for society. In this post, I'll go over the "bivariate regression, " which usually comes in the form of one posting a scatterplot plotting guns or number of gun control laws against some outcome variable.  The bivariate regression tells us little about the relationship between variable X and variable Y. Firstly, I know it doesn't need to be repeated, but correlation is not causation. This means that two variables can be positively correlated with each other (usually represented by some R^2 value), but that does not mean the independent variable causes the dependent variable to change. You can find all sorts of " spurious correlations " online that any reasonable person would correctly conclude have no causal re...

by David In Florida, the speaker of the House, Paul Renner, just introduced a bill that would make Florida a permitless or "Constitutional Carry" state. This means that Florida would join 25 other states in establishing this type of law. As for the empirics, I go through them in this post here on Gun Audit. Overall, I come to the conclusion that we don't have enough data to make definitive claims about the likely effects of the law. However, we do know about the effects of shall-issue or right-to-carry (RTC) laws, where one has to obtain a permit before legally concealed carrying in public.  I have a feeling that, if the bill passes, the same type of scenario is going to play out as when Florida passed its RTC law in 1987: politicians and pro-control advocates claiming the law will send crime soaring and the crime rate not ending up soaring.  Here, using the CDC WONDER database, I graph out Florida vs. neighboring states' homicide rates both pre and post-RTC law. Th...