The argument is that legal guns increase gun deaths but reduce other types of crime, either by substitution (e.g. reducing knife crime) or by deterrence (e.g. reducing home burglaries).
That claim has its own burden of proof that it needs to meet before it can be accepted, but looking at other countries and saying "More guns means more shootings" isn't addressing the actual argument.
Suicides don't count? For the record: I'm 100% in favor of public policy that results in large decreases in the suicide rate.
They also don’t count 1 for 1.
It’s much easier to substitute something else for a gun when committing suicide than when murdering someone.
That idea seems to be belied by the upthread assertion that gun deaths disproportionately represent suicides.
What else is highly effective and messy? Jumping from someplace high. There are lots of high places. I'd much prefer they go the gun route because jumpers sometimes land on someone as most such places that are readily available are in urban areas.
Suicide is a mental health issue, not a gun issue.
> Suicide in the United Kingdom declined after coal stoves were phased out, removing a means of suicide by carbon monoxide that had been available in many homes. Tylenol (or acetaminophen) overdoses in England and Wales fell by 43 percent after legislation passed requiring that the medication be sold in “blister packs” where you have to pop out each individual pill; that simple switch from big bottles was enough to save lives. When the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18095174/pesti...
And if someone does decide to try to kill themselves, guns are more likely to be fatal:
> About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-...
“ In the early 1960s, asphyxiation with domestic gas accounted for nearly half of suicides in England and Wales.3 The conversion of the British gas supply to North Sea gas, which was free of carbon monoxide, essentially eliminated domestic gas suicides in England and Wales and, moreover, was accompanied by a steep decline in the overall suicide rate (a 30% decline in England and Wales between 1960 and 1971, and a smaller decrease in Scotland), driven by the fall in gas suicides.”
Additionally, in the case specifically of guns, they’re more impactful for suicides BECAUSE they’re so effective. In the US they account for 1% of suicide attempts, but 50% of suicide deaths.
There was a complete prohibition on CO containing gas. Go read the story again.
The point is that perspective matters. You want to treat "crime" as a single thing because it seems like "the actual argument" to you, and when I see that same argument it looks like senseless spin because it's trying to dilute the US's outrageous homicide rate in an analysis by comparing it to burglaries in Amsterdam or whatever.
Yes, and I'm not advocating for that.
My only point is that "less gun deaths in countries without legal guns" isn't addressing the original claim that other crimes have decreased as a consequence of legal guns. I'm not taking a position on whether that claim is true, or what exactly they mean by that, which are both questions I also would like to be answered.
Once you include multiple countries, isn't your data skewed by "countries at war import a lot of guns"?
> or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?
That's not spin. You want to minimize total deaths, not "gun violence". If banning guns meant instead of getting shot, the same number of people got stabbed instead, the ban would be pointless.
It's almost like, as I said above, the clearly obvious determining factor in gun violence is the simple number of weapons. That this obvious hypothesis is simply disbelieved by large numbers of HN posters (many of whom like to call themselves "rationalists") continues to astound me.
Except that this simply is not true.
Gun violence in the us is not correlated with gun ownership.
It is correlated with poverty. It’s as simple as that.
This is because ‘gun violence’ is just violence.
Calling it ‘gun violence’ makes it seem like it’s about guns, but it really isn’t.
The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime, on the whole, from largely survivable violence to presumptively lethal injury. And that's bad, thus the game-playing with "crime" statistics instead of shootings to try to obscure the clear truth.
And the proper answer here is gun. You're much less likely to be hurt by a mugger with a gun--the mugger is far more likely to rely purely on deterrence rather than actually use his weapon.
Would you prefer to be mugged or a mugger to be shot?
That’s a fine perspective to have, but it completely contradicts the people here who are saying no one is demanding prohibition.
If your prior is "gun rights are super important and any attempt to regulate guns must be resisted", then it leads you inevitably to ridiculous arguments like "AKTUALLY guns reduce crime (for some variant definition of crime that includes non-violent stuff)" or (and you fell right into this one) "[gun regulation] leads inevitably to large scale gun confiscation or prohibition"[1].
At what point will the gun folks come back to rational compromise? You know how you end up with inevitable prohibition? When it's the only option left to the majority.
[1] Which is just clearly false, look at the diversity of gun laws across the globe! CLEARLY it's true that you can regulate them better than the US without "inevitably" confiscating them. Look at Canada, for goodness sake.
The point I see you making is to say that all people who are against gun control are irrational, but it this appears to be a bare claim unsupported by an argument.
Again, I don't see how an argument that "crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny" can be anything but laughable given data points like "Japan" or "Belgium".