I guess you've dropped the "you can't defend yourself with a gun because you'll be dead before you could shoot back idea". Good.
The US is an outlier. If you just compare the US, to just Europe, and maybe a few rich Asian countries, you get the appearance of "more guns, more murder". If however you look at the different countries in Europe and compare them, or if you look at the world as a whole, the correlation breaks down. Also if you look at non-gun murders you see the rate is higher in the US then in those European countries (or in Japan, etc.), despite the fact that we have more guns (which would tend to shift potential non-gun murders to gun murders both because the murderer is more likely to be armed, and because the potential victim is more likely to be armed and the would be killer doesn't want to take a knife to a gun fight). On top of all that as guns have gotten more numerous in the US the murder rate has gone down.
So it would seem that the "more murders" would be at least primarily, possibly totally, or possibly even more then totally (with more guns meaning fewer murders, but with other factors overwhelming that) due to something other then "more guns".
And even if we accepted for the sake of argument that "more guns = more murder", what actually policy proposals on the table would do anything about that? Banning guns because of cosmetic features, certainly wouldn't. |
