I found the startlingly erroneous data that I believe started this, and it's a morality tale about modern journalism: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8544507/gu ... hip-charts. Posted at vox.com June 20, 2015 (note the date), by Javier Zarracina (javier.zarracina@vox.com). It opens with: "Despite signs of decline in gun ownership, the US still has a huge number of private guns." And goes downhill from there.Helena Bachmann, for USA Today wrote:Even though guns are prevalent, the violent crime rate is relatively low: about 7.7 firearm homicides a year per 1 million people, according to Human Development Index. In the United States, that number is nearly 30, one of the highest in the world.
Mr. Zarracina goes on to present a graphic that purports to be sourced from 2012 data by the UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime) and shows "homicides by firearm per 1 million people." Yeppers: per 1 million.
Below is a link to the (rather large) UNODC original publication for 2013 detailing results from the surveys. And we do need to be clear: the data the UN receives are submitted voluntarily by member nations, and taken at the face value of those submissions. I won't say there is misrepresentation, only that countries are free to respond to the surveys as they wish (nevertheless, a valuable and well-produced study):
https://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdf ... OK_web.pdf
And, yes, guess what: the homicide rates are computed per 100,000 population, not per 1 million. What I can't figure out with only a cursory glance at the UN publication is where Mr. Zarracina extrapolates a U.S. homicide rate of 29.7 (per any population count). From page 23 of the UN publication, here is an infographic of reported homicide rates by country:
It shows the U.S. falling into the 3.00 to 4.99 range. How that becomes 29.7 in Mr. Zarracina's analysis, I have no idea.
What is even more bizarre is that Mr. Zarracina credits raw data from the UNODC, but as reported by The Guardian in this July 22, 2012 article: https://www.theguardian.com/news/databl ... world-list.
Very interestingly, that article blatantly writes, correctly: "But the US does not have the worst firearm murder rate--that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the US is number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people."
So where did Mr. Zarracina get his data? And why was he writing in June 2015 about data reported in 2012?
Nobody seemed to care. It was on the Internet in what seemed to be a professional article, so it has to be true, right?
A month after Mr. Zarracina's post on Vox, Statista ("the Statistics Portal") picked it up and turned in into its own infographic...replete with all the erroneous and unfounded data. From July 27, 2015: https://www.statista.com/chart/3672/ame ... rspective/.
This was the work of one Niall McCarthy (niall.mccarthy@statista.com), title "Data Journalist"...a "journalist" who never bothered to take 30 seconds of his time to check the source data in the citation; he just ran with it and built a little chart that was sure to get a lot of hits because the numbers were just too insanely spectacular to ignore. And, of course, too insane to be even close to true.
Now we fast-forward a year to July 27, 2016, when one Helena Bachmann, writing for USA Today, and...wait a minute.
GUESS WHAT? USA Today has deleted from the article any mention whatsoever of homicide rates. And they did so without a whisper. Dangit, I didn't do a screen grab earlier, and I can't find the cached article on Google. I did copy the quotation about the US firearm homicide rate before the "redaction," though.
The article was online for over three days, and they decide to "correct" it in the past hour? Well, at least they removed the incorrect and inflammatory data that Ms. Bachmann--in the modern journalistic tradition--found online and included in her article as fact without ever doing an ounce of research. But click this link to a Google search to see how many sites picked up information from/existence of the article before USA Today corrected it; well over 5,000.
And the media wonders why we don't trust the media.
