Re:Ask HN: Is gun purchase data available?
by dsfyu404ed on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @03:20PM
(#11948628)
I think that's a very generous assumption considering that strict gun control laws mostly correlates with population density. Gun laws vary a lot from state to state and in most states that have some sort of licensing requirement anyone below the top half of the middle class would have to invest a non-trivial (a little more/less than a driver's license) amount of time and money into owning any sort of firearm. I know in the Boston area the unwritten policy is "municipalities inside I495 typically don't issue concealed carry permits unless you're a cop or politically connected" Basically state laws can skew things a lot.
you can't just take the well behaved subset of the US population and then compare it to an other country on the whole. Thats ridiculous.
You would need to do the same segmentation of the English population, and compare like segments.
The first, obvious conclusion from FBI data is that a group making up approximately 4% of the US population commits about half the US homicides, mostly against others in that group, and the other 96% of the US has a homicide rate lower than England - and also much lower violent crime rate than England.