Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds

Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by tootie on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:16PM (#28556928)

I think the simplest counterpoint is Britain. The US Second Amendment is a direct descendant of the British Common Law right to bear arm. And Britain is arguably our national parent with a similar culture and history and a modern pluralistic culture. They effectively ended their right to private gun ownership in the 20th century to the point that it's now extremely difficult to procure one and there are very few guns owned per capita. And their homicide rate is less than half of ours. Same goes for Australia and several other first world democracies. You can at the very least say that rate of gun ownership has no correlation with gun crime. And quite possibly that it correlates directly in that more guns leads to more gun deaths.

So, personally (subjectively), I don't find it admirable at all. Freedom is a good default option, but I see America's gun culture as pretty sickening.

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by zepto on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:04PM (#28557573)

One reason their homicide rate is less than half ours is that their clearance rate for murders is >90% vs around 60% in better parts of the US. This was a result of the British police adopting a standard and very effective methodology for investigating murders in the 70’s and 80’s.

There is a lot of criminological evidence that the deterrent effect of policing is proportional to the predictability of the crime being solved, rather than the harshness of the punishment.

If we want less murders, we need to put more effort into catching murderers. That is where the cause and effect relationship lies. It is also something that the British know how to do, and which we could learn from.

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by philwelch on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:30PM (#28557922)

Britain also spent a long time transporting violent criminals and resettling much of the relatively violent “Scotch-Irish”/“Borderer” population to the American colonies. We also got a lot of their religious fanatics. This explains a lot about America.

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by wutbrodo on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:25PM (#28571082)

If you're looking for ethnic explanations, the evidence deosnt match the claim that Borderers drive the American homicide rate to any real degree. While the White American murder rate is higher than Britain's, it's less than half that of the overall American murder rate, which is largely driven by the homicide rate amongst African Americans, which is 7x that of whites.

Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/21/how-amer...

Britain at 1.2, white Americans at 2.2, African Americans at 15.5

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by rpmisms on Thursday September 16, 2021 @06:49PM (#28558802)

This is an excellent point that I don't hear often.

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by lr4444lr on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:35PM (#28559181)

Did the homicide rate drop occur after the increasing restriction, or was it already low/dropping?

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by tootie on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:12PM (#28560795)

The laws are pretty old so I doubt there's reliable data. Australia has a clearer case. Firearm deaths definitely decreased after a 1996 law that pulled hundreds of thousands of weapons off the street. Rates were already decreasing before the ban but seemed to drop faster after. It wasn't a dramatic change and can't be directly attributed to the law.

I'll say this other thing though. Rates of violence aside, first world democracies that curbed gun ownership typically show better measures of development (for men and women) across the board. There was no slippery slope of lost freedom and government didn't suddenly oppress their unarmed citizens.

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/199...

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by lr4444lr on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:26AM (#28563071)

We are trying to get at causality here. Even in thr Australia case, I have to ask, did crimes committed by _illegally_ owned firearms decrease after the law? Much as we can productively debate who should or should not be allowed to own a firearm, I don't think there's much disagreement that there is some class of people who _shouldn't_.

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Re:Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds by tootie on Friday September 17, 2021 @07:01PM (#28571857)

I don't think it's possible to prove causality. But it stands to reason that decreasing the supply of weapons raises the price making it harder to acquire them legally or illegally. And the cost of making legal gun ownership harder seems to be minimal.

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