The Australia and British laws and results are evidence that is plain in front of you. Those are humans on a different piece of land on our planet that on a whole have less gun violence occurring because there are less guns.
You can talk about culture, how it wouldn't work, etc. but that is the exact point the parent comment is making.
It would be nice if the US would let the CDC do in-depth studies of this nature, but gun lobbyists have blocked this from happening.
Do you honestly think that he wants information about less guns leading to lower cardiac arrests? Or perhaps less motor vehicle accidents involving death?
There is only one type of death that is in context in a discussion about firearms, death caused by firearms.
You can see similar things happening in UK recently, where they had a heavy campaign on banning knifes. This has resulted in increased use of acid attacks in gang/criminal violence.
"The same willful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to ..."
I was merely pointing out that haggy's comment ("I would love to see hard statistical evidence that less guns = less deaths...") was an exact example of this willful ignorance. The fact that we are discussing gun death/violence isn't really the point.
The point is that there are policies/laws working in other areas of the world and its kinda silly to outright dismiss them because "its different here" etc.
There will always be violent criminals. My belief is if there are less firearms, there are less choices for those criminals to easily commit violence. I would think survival chances when a criminal is attacking with a knife are much higher than if they had a gun.
The problem with this statement is that it is injecting an untested hypothesis in a discussion about the lack of facts when making policy.
You are right that natural deaths are unlikely to be affected, but it's entirely possible for other kinds of death to be affected (e.g. if I can't shoot you I may stab you to death). The appropriate category to compare would be violent deaths.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...
The expansion of maintenance access, both to suboxone and methadone clinics, safe injection sites, needle exchanges and other hard decisions are going to need to be made more quickly than usual to stem the tide.
Harm reduction works, prohibition doesn't.
[edit] the graph came out looking like this https://twitter.com/73rhodes/status/915604039873769472
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151008/NEWS02/15100...
The question is why Chicago has problems with organised violence and other places don't to the same degree. I think if you look into it, the reasons are significantly more complex than "one place has more legal guns" - the data for that hypothesis doesn't make sense when plotted on a chart.
His perception of reality, his interpretation of threats, and what drove his motivations were are an exceptionally poor basis for establishing public gun policy.