By Vince Smith,
Big Rock, Ill.
As I read Leonard Wass’ August 4 letter to The Voice pertaining to gun control laws, it brought to mind a well-known quote attributed to Mark Twain: “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable”.
Certainly Mr. Wass is entitled to his own political opinions, but I find his attempt to support those opinions by an awkward distortion of widely available statistical data to be offensive and ineffective.
At the core of his computational caper is “the list”. Although he fails to identify the source of his list, it is most likely the list compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). That list includes data on the incidence of murder in each of 195 different countries across the globe. Mr. Wass first accurately points out that the United States ranks third on this list (2020 data), but he chooses to ignore the fact that when our population ranks third and is taken into account, our ranking tumbles to 59th. From this point forward his mathematical machinations become even more mysterious and misleading.
He suggests that if we could rid ourselves of the Democratic Party control of the cities of Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Washington D.C., we could subtract the number of murders in each of those cities from our current national total, yielding the enviable ranking of 189th on the list!!! (Keep in mind, rankings on this list are like scores on the golf course… lower is better). In addition to his suggestion being idiotic, his mathematical manipulations of the available data would earn him an F in any sixth grade classroom. It is not particularly easy to find the relevant raw number (rather than rate) of murders for each of these cities, but for anyone interested in doing the calculations themselves, the Rochester Institute of Technology has published online a well-done summary of homicide statistics for 24 U.S. cities which include these. From those data, it is clear that the combined number of murders in those cities on which Mr. Wass has focused amounted to less than 10% of our national total in 2020. Therefore it should surprise no one that our ranking on “the list” would fall only two or three places, hardly the precipitous drop that Mr. Wass claimed.
But, regardless of Mr. Wass’ ill-founded rationale for making our country safer, I’m most disturbed by the words of his last paragraph: “our Second Amendment for the specific purpose…to take down a corrupt government.” The Second Amendment is in place to allow for an armed takeover of a government that he may view as corrupt? Is that what January 6 was all about? In what country do we live?