[Jimro]

The math from the Texas study is torturous.

The overall violent crime rate in Florida from 2005 to 2012 per 100k residents is:

2005: 702.2
2006: 705.8
2007: 705.5
2008: 670.3
2009: 604.9
2010: 542.9
2011: 519.3
2012: 492.6

Clearly Castle laws do not have a negative impact on the total rate of violent crime.

As far as "murder" and "manslaughter" the numbers are all over the charts, and increase or decrease depends on where you set the zero. By setting the zero at 2005 when Florida had the lowest number of homicides in a 20 year spread it makes the following years show a growth in homicide.

However, if you set the zero at 1992 (1,191 homicides), there is a reduction in total number of homicides to 2012 (1,009 homicides), but a 5.5 Million person increase in the population. The authors failed to take in historical variability as a confounding factor in their methodology, and the review board should have caught that.

So violent crime has been on the demise since 1992 in Florida, homicide numbers have fluctuated between a high of 1,191 and a low of 881. Average homicides per year, 977, with a standard deviation of 115. However this is for total homicides in the state of Florida, and not per 100k residents, which has continually gone down (save for one year, slight bump) as the population grew faster than the crime rate.

So, looking at the methodology makes me think that the authors of the article took a conclusion, then twisted the math to make an argument with a pseudo-scientific justification.

Jimro