Geography 101 Lab Series: Research Review Part #2

Nothing really to say that I didn’t say yesterday on this assignment. Except maybe that, while I attempted to keep the blogger in me restrained for the assignment, I failed in a couple places and let the snark stay where it was spewed.

Conversely, I absolutely had to hold back the actual vitriol, and therefore didn’t crush Mr. Doyle (though I may have accused him of agitprop).

I hope you enjoy reading what I submitted to the Professor.

As with the other assignments, I put in links to my sources instead of footnotes, and my grade for the paper is after the block quote. I’ve included a couple of extra links at the bottom of the page that I didn’t end up using but thought that y’all might find handy in the future.

Enjoy!

For this assignment, I would like to discuss a topic that is widely spoken of but rarely seriously discussed: The widely held view that American gun culture is more violent than the cultures of other western nations. I’ll be basing my work on an October 2000 article in Scientific American magazine by Rodger Doyle titled “The Roots of Homicide”, in which he makes a number of statements that, on their face seem reasonable, but once the facts are delved into a bit deeper, become completely unsupportable scientifically.

From the article, we are led to believe that the U.S. is the most violent nation among the industrialized nations because of its high rate of firearms ownership. However, if one is sly enough to take even a quick look at the top of the page they will see a map. If the reader were this brave, they will notice that Russia and the Eastern European nations formerly under Soviet domination, where owning a firearm was forbidden except for a select few “well-connected” individuals, have homicide rates which are three times higher than those in the U.S..

Are we supposed to believe that people in these nations are murdering each other with pointed sticks?

Mr. Doyle states that “Among Western industrialized nations, gun ownership correlates with homicide.” The most gobsmacking flaw in this statement is that one of the most heavily armed nations on the planet, per capita, is Switzerland. When a Swiss male reaches nineteen years of age, he is given military firearms training and issued a fully automatic, military grade battle rifle (along with ammunition) for him to keep in his home as a member of the nation’s version of the Civilian Defense Forces.

Yet Switzerland’s homicide rate is only two-thirds of that of the United Kingdom’s, where Doyle writes “virtually no one owns a gun”.

Another problem with comparing U.S. violent crime statistics with those from the UK, is that the UK’s own Law Commission considers the nation’s criminal statutes on homicide to be “A Mess”. As a rather disturbing example; if one were to commit the act of homicide in the UK but only be convicted of manslaughter, it is counted among the total number of crimes but not under the specific statistics as “Murder”. Because of this, it would not be counted under the classification of a “gun crime” in any of the statistical measurements of homicide currently published.

This is the same for a number of other western countries because of the glacial speed with which their legal systems adapt. Australia, for example, banned and confiscated a large number of popular firearms outright. Shortly thereafter, the nation saw an explosion of Home Invasion style robberies. Since their legal system did not have an official classification for that type of robbery, multiple lesser charges had to be cobbled together so that offenders could be prosecuted.

Just to single out the nations on the North American continent as another example; while Canada does have a far lower rate of firearms ownership, if we correlate the firearms ownership numbers versus the homicide rate, we find that America’s rate is actually lower. But this is not how it is portrayed anywhere in the popular media. If we also examine and compare Mexico’s numbers, the US begins to look like a peaceful utopia.

A true examination of the facts by Mr. Doyle would have shown that the only “Culture” problem within the US is the same one that haunts the rest of the industrialized nations: That homicide rates parallel rates in illicit drug trafficking and use. Whenever a market arises for an illegal substance, people who supply the substance will fight and kill each other for the incredible profit to be made. And they care very little about those not involved in the dispute who get in their way.

Mr. Doyle completely neglects to point out to the reader that there was an almost direct correlation between the rise in their homicide rate and the skyrocketing illicit drug crime in the UK. Yet at the time of his article’s publication, the UK had a complete ban on the private ownership of handguns, to the point where the nation’s Olympic Pistol Team had to travel to Switzerland for training purposes. There was also a ban on the ownership of repeating rifles and shotguns. Conversely, firearms ownership in the US was steadily climbing while our crime rate was steadily falling as we began to gain a foothold in the struggle to control our drug problem.

In conclusion, Mr. Doyle’s article seems, to me, to be agenda driven. False belief due to an omission of facts on top of an agenda does not equal science.

Grade: 100%

I got full points on this one, to even my own surprise. From his comments, the Professor liked that I had multiple sources disproving of Mr. Doyle’s tale of woe, AND, once again, that I did the statistical math. I tried to make sure that there was very little left of Doyle’s argument with which he could deny me at least an 80% on the paper. Any less would have gotten his grading policies brought up for review.

Here are some extra links you might find helpful in future discussion but I couldn’t fit into the assignment

Failed Experiment: Gun Control

Gun Control, Not Crime Control

Are Guns Really More Dangerous

Thanks for reading this series. I hope you all enjoyed it. I’m currently embroiled in an English course which could prove to be even more strange. I’ve come to the conclusion that my English professor believes she can “whisper” to animals. That and she believes that a 5 Credit per quarter course should involve 5 hours of classroom time AND 10 hours of homework per week (which is where I’ve been the past couple days).

We’ll see how it goes.