STATS ARTICLES 2007
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Counting Gun Traffic
Updated August 22
Did the Washington Post malign Virginia?
"In Study of Gun Traffic, Va. Stands Out," reads the front-page headline in the August 21 Washington Post. According to the lead paragraph,
"Law enforcement authorities traced more than 10,000 guns recovered in Virginia, Maryland and the District [of Columbia] last year – and nearly half came from Virginia, according to federal data released yesterday."
Say what? It’s front-page news when you combine the number of guns from two states and a city, and one state accounts for nearly half the total of these three jurisdictions? In fact, Virginia’s share was actually 46 percent.
We know this because the Post kindly presented the actual figures in a table on an inside page: Virginia 7,571 guns recovered, Maryland 7,025 guns, and DC 1,831.That means Virginia outpaced Maryland by just under eight percentage points, and both far outstripped Washington DC, which has a far smaller population than either state. But that’s hardly front-page news.
To see just how misleading the Post’s lead was, we can make a simple statistical adjustment that reflects these population differences. According to July 2006 US Census estimates rounded to the nearest thousand, Virginia’s population is approximately 7,643,000, Maryland’s is 5,616,000, and the District of Columbia’s is only 582,000. That means Virginia, which accounted for eight percent more guns than Maryland, also accounts for 36 percent more people.
And on a per capita basis, the rate of guns recovered was about ten per 100,000 people in Virginia, thirteen per 100,000 in Maryland, and 31 per 100,000 in the District. So the article could just as easily have concluded that guns were recovered at a rate three times as high in DC as in Virginia, relative to population.
The article goes on to discuss other evidence, such as other east coast states where Virginia-traced guns have turned up. But the focus is on the DC-VA-MD comparison a local angle that backfires. In fact, we recommend that the Post switch to higher caliber information in its bulletins on firearms.
Update
The Washington Post is not the only paper to stumble over the data: In today's New York Times, the editorial page notes,
"Virginia dealers have been a standout source for guns used in crimes up and down the seaboard, according to the federal study. They accounted for half of the 10,000 guns tracked by the study in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, and one in 11 in New York City."
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