Who The Hell Are You Calling An "Outlier"?

Over on Sean's blog, he's got this post on how to argue gun control and quotes from a CDC report on the effectiveness of firearm laws.

I wanna focus on something rather interesting I found in that report.

Toward the end, the report notes:

This is a critical period for focused research on the effectiveness of firearms laws in reducing violence in the United States. International comparisons indicate that the United States is an outlier among developed, industrialized nations in rates of firearms violence

and cites a 1998 article from the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Hear that?

We're an outlier.

Now I don't have access to that article to check the data.

But, that same article is quoted in a report from the Firearm & Injury Center at Penn called Firearm Injury in the U.S.(PDF):

Compared to other industrialized countries, violence and firearm death rates in the United States are disproportionately high. Of the approximately 50 upper- and middle-income countries with available data, an estimated 115,000 firearm deaths occur annually and the U.S. contributes about 30,000.

Figure 4 on page 8 of the report then lists the countries in question.

If we take the top 5 high income countries from that list, in addition to the U.S., and look at their number of homicides and homicide rates for 2008 (data taken from this spreadsheet from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime), we get:

U.S. 9,484 (3.1)
Canada 196 (0.6)
Austria 18 (0.2)
Belgium 70 (0.7)
Denmark 6 (0.1)
England/Wales 38 (0.1)

(NOTE: Data for Austria was only available for 2006, 2004 for Belgium)

Yeah.

Based on the numbers above, the U.S. rate runs some 3 times higher.

Outlier.

But--

But--

Let's also look at Brazil and Mexico. According to Figure 4 from the report, both countries are classified as "upper middle income countries."

Data from the spreadsheet gets us the following for number of homicides and homicide rates:

Brazil 34,678 (18.1)
Mexico 5,095 (4.6)

Whoa! That's interesting.

The U.S. is an outlier? At 3.1?

What does that make Brazil and Mexico?

"But wait!" you say. "Mexico has less homicides than we do. 5,095 versus our 9,484."

True.

But Brazil still beats us with 34,678 homicides. Over 25,000 more than us.

And, here's something else interesting--they have strict gun licensing and registration requirements.

Given that, how exactly will stricter gun laws lower firearm violence?

Because that is the point of the CDC report. Finding better gun laws--better than the some 20,000 already on the books--to reduce firearm deaths.

But looking at Brazil, how exactly with even stricter laws work?

And how exactly are we outliers?