Friday, July 20, 2012

Nothing today

In light of all the political news centering around the theater shooting in Colorado, I don't have anything to talk about today.  Seems inappropriate to have a post about gun control or something.

3 comments:

Emily said...

Hey my rather smart friend - any chance you could help me find some trust worthy statistics on gun control vs more lenient gun laws and it's results on violent crimes? or statistically my likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime compared to my likelihood of declaring medical bankruptcy or dying due to an inability to pay for treatment or to receive proper screening until a disease is too far progressed to be treated? My inquiring mind wants to know.

PoliticalDoctor said...

Here's an abstract for the most recent article I could find on the effect of right-to-carry (concealed weapons) laws on various classes of crimes. They find aggravated assault goes up if concealed weapons are allowed, which seems counter-intuitive to me, and nothing else is significantly changed.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1632599

Gallup surveys (sorry they're a few years old) indicate 2-3% of the population reports being a victim of a violent crime in the past year. 2-3% of the population is something like 6-9 million.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/102658/us-crime-victimization-trends-flat.aspx

A New York Times health care business blog estimated in 2009 that there would be around 900,000 medical bankruptcies that year affecting 2.4 million people, or about 0.8% of the population.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/insured-but-bankrupted-anyway/

A famous study (at least amongst pinko commie doctors like myself) done at Harvard estimated that 44,000 Americans die each year due to lack of insurance, which is equal to 0.014% of the population.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=lack-of-insurance-causes-more-than-2009-09-17

Emily said...

Thanks