The supposed effects of the DC gun ban.

One of the first things I did when starting this blog, was warn people about causal relationships.

This has come forward recently in a left rudder post, the author has posted a graph of the DC murder rate. (she sais that the Bureau of Justice Statistics has sourced these, but has failed to provide me with a link). The FBI's uniform crime report puts the count of murder and non-unintentional homicides at 195 and 198 for 2004 and 2005 for DC

She's replying to a deltoïd post, where the author has posted this link, but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

Anyway,
The issue at hand: can the DC murder rate (and by extension:crime rate) be caused by the current gun politics?
If it turns out that the murder rate went down, then I don't think so. See, the law bans most guns used for DC murder, so the street availability of guns did not decrease and so: it could not have been an important factor.

But like I said: It's currently very high, which can be a consequence of the reduced amount of people carrying concealed weapons. Of course it's just as impossible of establishing causal relationship here.
I'm currently going through the usdoj myself looking for a complete set of numbers, to get a better picture of the situation, Bureau of Justice Statistics is up next

You should too: always question statistics in the form they are presented to you!

Here's the graph I made from the figures found here:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm
I really wish that site cited its sources, the last two numbers check out with the FBI, but I don't know if it's all correct.

If this is correct, you can see that the gun ban didn't have all that much effect on the murder count (note: this isn't the murder rate). The surge in violence takes place almost ten years later, which is hardly a reason to blame that specific event in gun law legislation.

The gun ban didn't save or destroy lives, all that it's been proven to have done, is cost the taxpayer money.