LogFAQs > #896526738

Selenara posted...

Those numbers include homicides, suicides and accidents. I was looking for a gun homicide statistic, because the typical trend is for gun suicides to drop while homicides remain relatively unaffected.

I'm interested in seeing a source on that (particularly given that I just spent half my post talking about Canadian homicide rates and how they dropped).

But, perhaps more to the point, so what? Gun violence of all types is bad. Even if the reduction is seen in suicides instead of homicides, isn't that still a goal worth pursuing?

Selenara posted...

There are other studies that show the opposite however, so this is debatable.

Of course it is. You can find studies that say whatever you want them to, particularly on an issue as contentious as guns.

So dial back and think big picture. Why does the US have an out-of-control murder rate (4.9 per 100k, more than countries like Rwanda, Niger, and Lebanon)? If it held that minimalist gun laws and widespread access to firearms at worst do not affect crime rates and at best helps lower them, why does the US have a the highest murder rate in the developed world? And not one that's a little bit higher than its peers, but one that's between ~triple (it's 2.9x Canada's 1.7 per 100k) and 16 times (Japan boasts a 0.31 per 100k rate) higher?

You could make the case that the US is simply more predisposed to crime due to non-gun-related factors, but that doesn't add up either - if that were the case, you would expect crime rates to be up across the board and while the US does trend on the average-to-high side for crime rates compared to other developed nations, the numbers are still largely in line compared to the aggregate data set. It is only the murder rate in which the US is so wildly out of step with the rest of the developed world.

And we see this play out in micro-scale within the states. Gun-tolerant states almost universally have higher homicide rates than those states that have stricter gun laws.

If you have an alternate explanation for these trends, I'm open to hearing it, but the evidence in support of gun laws seems pretty airtight to me.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
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