Apples and Apples at Gay Orbit

Michael links to this report, and claims that overall violent crime in Canada is shockingly almost twice that in the US. Michael uses this as a reason to assault the gun laws in Canada.

Of course, he’s not really comparing apple to apples. He’s not even comparing apples to oranges. He’s comparing apples to a picture of a painting of some apples.

Let me explain.

First of all, lets start with the two comparisons (Here and here - Do yourself a favor, open them in 2 windows and look at them side by side). Notice anything?

Well, for starters, the US tracks less categories than Canada. Canada tracks 8 categories of crime, US only 5. For instance, US doesn’t have an ‘abductions’ category while Canada does. 'So what?', you say. 'If you add them up, it doesn’t matter how you break them down'. Well, that’s true if the ‘abductions’ are counted under another US category – which isn’t clear, and looks doubtful. Also, there’s no indication that the US ‘Aggravated Assaults’ category is the same (or even similar) to the ‘Assaults total’ category in Canada. Aggravated assaults In the US usually require a weapon, or other means, that could cause ‘death or great bodily injury’. A fist fight, then, would not be counted in the US, but could be counted in Canada. (Here’s the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2000, the year of the comparisons in the above links. If I can find the similar reports for Canada – I’ll update the post.)

Even if you assume, however, that the reporting criteria are close enough, and that the categories in one report is a fair match to the categories in the other, there’s still a problem.

With the exception of Robbery, where they report offenses, Canada reports the number of victims. The US reports the number of offenses for all crimes. Clearly, not apples and apples. And, just as clearly, these are not the same things (otherwise Canada would report either all victims or all offenses, not offenses for some crimes and victims for others).

Robbery, then, is the only ‘kind of’ apples to apples comparison we have between the US and our northern neighbors (at least, as available via the links provided). Let’s look at Robbery then (using the numbers provided).

Robbery offenses US v. Canada

While suggestive, this honestly doesn’t tell us much about violent crime in the US compared to canada. Robbery in the US (using the US definition) only accounts for a mere 3.5 percent of all the crimes in the UCR. So, other than the fact that the US experiences robberies at a rate almost twice that of Canada, for the same 100,000 group, we don't know much about how violent crimes in the two nations compare.

But, using Michaels’ logic, stronger gun control leads to less robbery.

>Note: Michael got the link from this blog, who didn’t seem to examine the numbers too much either. >

Updates: I made some minor edits to improve readability

Dean Esmay said (at September 9, 2005 02:45 AM):

Henry said (at September 9, 2005 07:53 AM):

Roy E Pearson said (at September 29, 2005 01:04 AM):