I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt and think that you didn't intend to offend, but I'd venture to guess that only extends to not intending to offend folks in this forum?

You chose to use term "redneck". When used like you did that's clearly a snide derogatory term that blankets a certain class of disadvantaged folks. Not only is that term insulting when used by you to a whole class of struggling people but you also then applied the implication of that term to a whopping 30% of Americans.

I think the problems are unrelated to gun ownership. If you were to plot the percent of gun ownership vs the crime rate among various states or even countries, you wouldn't find much of a correlation.

It's actually quite clear that there is a strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...

Overall crime, no, there is no correlation, but there is for guns used in crimes, which dramatically increases the rate of deaths and severity of those crimes.

Gun "violence" includes suicides. There is actually a negative correlation between gun ownership and homicides.

https://medium.com/@tgof137/gun-ownership-rates-do-not-predi...

The extremely obvious, plain reading of the gun ownership / gun murder rate data is that there's no relationship. Check this scatterplot[0].

The studies in your link are after "controlling for poverty and urbanization", "after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation", etc.

I'm not a statistician enough to argue the methodology of the papers, but I'll say given that the trend only emerges after lots of adjustments, it makes me a little skeptical. At least, it would be pretty easy to let some bias or motivated reasoning slip in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

Wouldnt that be a common sense thing ?

A criminal mind would use the tools available and a gun makes throwing rocks (chunks of lead) at people deadly more often than using your hand.

Look at criminal states, those leaders use armies instead of guns because they have an army available.

There are several studies on this that conclude otherwise. For example[1]:

"Firearm prevalence is significantly related to total violent crime (B = .600, p < .05). With each unit increase in firearm prevalence, the expected count of the violent crime index increases by .600. This also indicates that the percent change in the total violent crime is an 82% increase for every unit increase in firearm ownership. The prevalence of guns does significantly increase the violent crime in the county. This finding is consistent with previous research on firearm prevalence and crime both in the United States and internationally."

[1]: http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/jpj_firearm_owner...

So the study found a correlation between suicide by firearm and violent crime, not firearm prevalence and violent crime. They try to justify using suicide by firearm as a stand in for gun ownership, but if they don't have good stats on gun ownership to use for this study, then how could the previous studies have been able to make the connection between suicide by firearm and prevalence since they would need the same data.

>Firearm prevalence in the United States is difficult to determine because there is no database that collects information on firearm ownership and prevalence. Thus, analyses that study firearm prevalence have had to develop proxies for firearm ownership. As a proxy for firearm ownership, the current analysis used the percentage of suicides by a firearm from 2000 to 2010.

Little tricks like this are why people lose faith in science.

Proxies are used all of the time in studies and analysis of information that can't be directly collected. To claim that proxies are why people lose faith in science is absurd.

I view that study with suspicion as there are also some which show a very poor link or no link at all. But in either case: prohibiting the possession, sale, and consumption of alcohol would decrease disease and increase productivity. Why should we not do that?

That's an interesting correlation matrix on page 13.

> I think the problems are unrelated to gun ownership

Exactly, if the same logic for guns were used on other things then you'd have people up in arms saying nobody should be able to drive cars because of how many people kill others with them.

>guns have one purpose - shoot things

There is another one you are missing: deterring people from violence against other people, given the knowledge they might be carrying a gun. In a similar way to how nukes are actually used in 21st century.

Doesn't make the comparison between cars and guns any less stupid.

That one, I can definitely agree with.

But there is a correlation with mass shootings (yes, I know it's kinda obvious since you need guns for mass shootings whereas you don necessarily need guns for most crimes).

Copying the same source as a comment above to whoever downvoted this: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...

It's definitely the case that an armed populace acts as a check against tyranny. You can argue that this is not enough of a benefit to warrant private gun ownership given the societal costs and low probability of a tyrannical government in the US, but this benefit definitely exists.

How do you think almost ever other country in the world with more mature and developed democracies manage to maintain human rights without hoarding firearms?

I'm genuinely wondering.

I am not making the claim that private firearms ownership is required for maintaining human rights. My claim is that it is an additional control against tyranny, which it is. It is more difficult for a tyrannical government to enforce it's will on an armed populace than an unarmed populace.

The US is not Texas. The image a lot of my Europeans co-workers have is Texas. Not sure where you are from.

Fun fact, in my language "Texas" means crazy: https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/yall-norwegians-...