Injecting suicide rates into the discussion is a motte-and-bailey tactic. People make their legal case for regulation by invoking the right not to be murdered as outweighing the right go bear arms, but when confronted with the fact that gun control doesn’t appear to reduce homicides within the US, they shift the goalposts by citing numbers that lump in suicides. But the legal and moral justification for regulating guns to reduce suicides is very different than for homicides.
So?
> Injecting suicide rates into the discussion is a motte-and-bailey tactic.
Or it's simply the fact that I don't want people dying unnecessarily, whether at their own hand or another's. Why should we only worry about homicides? What is your intent in removing suicide from the equation?
Eye-balling this 2015 chart, there seems like there's a pretty good correlation between per capita ownership and per capita deaths (homicide+suicide):
* https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/gun-ownership...
* https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/gun-owners-stud...
The main outliers appear to be MA and HI, the former of which has some pretty strict rules (very similar to Canada's):
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
RAND did a (meta-)analysis and found that some policies are more effective than others, specifically: safe storage, waiting periods, background checks, domestic violence history restrictions:
* https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html
Stand-your-ground laws seem to lead to not-good things happening (nothing about castle doctrine though).
Good laws / regulations can counter high numbers though, it appears. Canada has one of the highest per capita ownership rates, and yet has quite low firearm-related death rate (lower than Finland, the Swiss, France, Austria):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...