CBS news ran a piece on new, anti-gun gun study that says nothing at all.

[bushd]

CBS posted the study on their website out of the Journal of the American Medical Assoc.

JAMA Internal Medicine

The article has serious flaws. My post on CBS site below.

The problem with this study is they make a very vague comment as their conclusion that people are taking as proof (that there might be a correlation between gun laws and firearm related deaths but they couldn't find it). There are some states with tough gun laws that have low gun-related fatalities and there are some states with tough gun laws that have high gun-related fatalities. The same is true for states with less gun laws. This is the very reason this study couldn't come to a conclusion regarding gun laws and gun deaths; there was no evidence in their data/charts (which included suicide and they didn't show the homicide only charts) that gun laws changed gun-related fatality rates. What they could conclude, which makes sense, was that gun ownership rates do seem to go hand in hand with total gun-related deaths (suicide + homicide).

Now, does this make sense given that most of the death count was from suicide? Yes, it does make sense! If there are more people who have guns and these individuals want to commit suicide they're going to do it with a gun.

What's worse is most of the federal legislation will be crafted based off of this article and the article doesn't attempt to classify handgun versus semi-automatic rifle, which all of the federal laws are attempting to curtail semi-automatic rifles.

I would like to see the relationship of gun ownership versus firearm homicide fatalities only and not total firearm fatalities. I would also like to see how the states with major cities of crime (Illinois, New York, and California) and some of the hardest gun laws fit into this setup.

After reading other comments I agree that the CDC (a medical organization) is not the best place for the statistics and that the FBI data would be the ideal case. It's likely they couldn't find any correlation what-so-ever using the FBI data. Given that it's simple mathematics, all you would have to do is plug in the database numbers and values would spit out. Looking at homicide rates over more then four years and not including suicide data then you will see we're actually significantly lower now then in the past.

Shouldn't have said all regarding federal laws and semi-automatic rifles. Meh. Most.