The Link Between Guns and Murder

Found some information collected by the U.N. on gun ownership rates and murder rates among nations.  I decided to make a scatter plot of the data and do a linear regression to see how strong the relationship was between the number of guns and the number of murders in nations around the world.  Here is the graph:


The linear regression resulted in a negative slope, which would indicate that as gun ownership goes up, murders go down.  However, before you pro-gun pundits get too excited, the R-Squared value of the relationship was .01.  The R-squared is a value that ranges from 0 - 1, with 1 indicating a perfect correlation, and 0 indicating no relationship.  A value of .01 essentially means there is no relationship between the number of guns in a country and the murder rate in that country.

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