Gun Violence-Short and Sweet

For all the talk lately about ways to reduce gun violence; there seems to be very little hard evidence. Lots of facebook memes, talking heads, and celebrity videos to be sure; but precious little hard evidence. So, I'm going to present you with some.
This is a link to a table that was published in the Washington Post on gun ownership and gun violence. http://goo.gl/68ozG. Don't worry, I'm not asking you to go and sift through the data and determine what it means; it's just so you can see where the numbers came from
I put this data in Excel, and ran a formula* that will give you the statistical relationship between two different sets of data. Go ahead and scan the results; noting the cells highlighted in green.

Now, if you think about it, if the number in the cell (called the correlation coefficient) is less than .5, then the two numbers coincide only half the time; meaning that you could have come up with them by flipping a coin or rolling a die; thus for our purposes, we will say that any number under .5 is not meaningful. You can see that there is:

NO CORRELATION between either A) Guns per 100 people and % of homicides by guns (percentage relationships) OR B) Total Civilian Guns and Total Homicides By Guns  (Total number relationships)
A SLIGHTLY NEGATIVE CORRELATION between both A) guns per 100 people and homicides by guns per 100,00 people (percentage relationships) and B) Total Civilian Guns and Homicides By Guns Per 100,000 people (crossing a percentage with a hard number). If you're a conservative, this makes sense. If you're a liberal, I would encourage you to think about why this doesn't make sense.

Now, I am not a mathematician or statistician; but you don't have to be either to look at these numbers, which  came from A) The Washington Post (not a conservative company) and B) Excel 2010 (An unbiased computer program.) To see that more guns DOES NOT mean more gun violence, and actually means a little bit LESS gun violence.



*=Correl(Data Range 1, Data Range 2)