Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
> It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down
That's actually the direct opposite of what the article says. The very first paragraph states: "Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards."
> When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
I agree. That was the premise of my question. Unfortunately, I haven't seen too much clarification yet :(
They don't give a source, but their own graph [1] shows that, aside from a tick on 2006, gun deaths have been trending down, almost indistinguishable from flat in recent years.
I couldn't find a nice graph, but googling gave me these two years (that I did not cherry pick): here's an anti-gun site giving the numbers for 1998 as 30K [2] and another anti-gun "just the facts" editorial in 2013 saying it's 31K. [3] Using normal per-population numbers, the US increased in population over 13% over that time.
The US in the 21st century is a very safe place to be. Foreign news may distort the picture, but middle-class Americans don't worry about being killed by guns.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
[2] http://college.cengage.com/english/resources/research_guide/...
[3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/16/16547690-just-the...
> Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
The cost at issue here is generally not monetary. Most safety features are designed to prevent the weapon from firing, which gives rise to the expression "loaded club."
Consider, e.g., the magazine safety, which prevents a semi-automatic weapon from firing without a magazine, even if a round is already chambered. If I owned a handgun, which I do not, I would absolutely want this feature. The likelihood that it would prevent a potentially fatal negligent discharge is much higher than the likelihood that it would be the decisive factor in me losing a gunfight. However, there are combat techniques that depend on the weapon firing without a magazine, and competitions in which it would be difficult or impossible to participate without that ability. There is also the risk that the safety would otherwise interfere with the operation of the weapon.
Therefore, the only conclusion available is that the theory is incorrect.
You may be able to salvage pieces of the result your are trying to obtain by a more careful analysis, but the facts do not permit "guns = gun crime" to be sustained at such a simplistic level. By the time one is done examining what the facts do sustain the result is far, far weaker.
That there is easy access to and widespread ownership of firearms in the US has not, to my knowledge, changed in the past 10 years, so a lack of change in the gun crime statistics indicates pretty much nothing.
As someone from a country with no easy access to firearms (and generally unarmed police), and knowing the gun crime statistics, I am continually amazed that people can argue that guns are uncorrelated with gun crime and keep a straight face.
It is also not generally the case that guns are always "bad"; guns are also significantly used in self-defense, usually without even being fired. Those who present "oh, just remove the guns" as a cost-free move are being disingenuous; again, people can reasonably disagree about the relative nature of the costs and benefits but those who present this as a zero-cost transaction are trying to pull one over on people.
It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down, and crime has significantly dropped in the past couple of decades. This is not exactly a set of circumstances that leads a rational person to leap to the conclusion that the presence and ownership of guns is an obvious root cause... and, yes, again, there may be confounding variables at play, but it still provides a bound on what you could even hope for if guns were entirely removed.
When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.