On the 2010 Brady Scorecard

So the Brady Campaign put out their new scorecard yesterday.  Normally I wouldn’t care but I got bored today.  So I took the 2006 Census data (latest accurate data available) and compared it to the score card.

Initially I plotted violent crimes per 100k versus the score given by the Brady Campaign.  What I got was lack luster to say the least.

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From the above there’s a couple things worth noticing.  The top scores are all middle of the pack.  Of those top scores, those with lower values actually have lower violent crime rates.  Also notice the complete lack of correlation, 0.0314. 

So first I’m going to do a little fun with numbers and play the same game the gun grabbers do before I really dig into the meat of what this shows.

The highest Brady scores are all middle of the pack regarding violent crime.  What is noticeable though is the highest scores all have an upward trend. 

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This still isn’t good enough so we will remove those three outliers at the bottom gave a very nice trend line with a somewhat decent correlation, 0.77784.  It also indicates that as the score goes up, so does violent crime.

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This though is throwing away data points and not looking at the whole picture, even though that trend line is exactly the opposite what CSGV and the Brady Campaign claims it should be.  So lets move on to looking at the data as a whole and seeing what can be found.

Now there are a couple other interesting trends within the data, but nothing more significant than what can be seen in that first graph.  More specifically looking at the data from all scores under 20.

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Notice that the violent crime rates are distributed across the entire field no matter what the score.  The trend line is almost perfectly flat, correlation sucks, and the three states who got scores of 0 are each in 3 completely different areas regarding the number of violent crimes.  Taking this into account it can be seen that the Brady scores do not really have an effect on violent crime rates.  Especially when the following is also noted:

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Only three states have a Brady score above 20, of those with crime rates below 200 none have a score above 10.  The bottom line is gun control has absolutely nothing to do with safety, lowering violent crime, or protecting anyone.  There is absolutely no correlation to indicate such and there are strong indicators that it may be counter productive.  Gun control only has to do with control, and making sure the law abiding lack the tools and ability to fight back against anyone who would do them harm.

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About TMM

TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms. Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.

One Response to On the 2010 Brady Scorecard

  1. Linoge says:

    So enacting the laws the Brady Campaign wants does, in fact, not lower the violent crime rates of the states in questoin?

    Color me shocked ;).