Thursday, January 27, 2011

Who Needs Gun Control?

When you have socialism? According to this guy, we could reduce our homicide rate by spreading poverty around equally.
The best predictor of high homicide rates in a region, they asserted, is income inequality. As a measure of such inequality, Daly and Wilson employed the so-called Gini index (named after its originator, the Italian statistician Corrado Gini), which ranks inequality on a scale ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. A region in which everyone has exactly the same income would have a Gini score of 0.0, whereas a region in which one person makes all the money has a score of 1.0.
Daly and Wilson found a strong correlation between high Gini scores and high homicide rates in Canadian provinces and U.S. counties. High Gini scores predicted homicides better than low average income, high unemployment and simpler measures. Basically, Daly and Wilson were blaming homicides not on poverty per se but on the collision of poverty and affluence, the ancient tug-of-war between haves and have-nots. The income-inequality hypothesis, Daly and Wilson asserted, can account for the "radically different national homicide rates" of the U.S. and Canada, the latter of which has more generous social-welfare programs (including universal health care) and hence fewer economic disparities.


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