No, it’s not. If the majority of the adult population was armed, crime would drop. If you’re a criminal and know there is a 90% chance your target will be armed, will you attack? How about if the target is two people. The only irony is thinking that more regulation is a good idea.
Most violent crime is because an idiot is not in control of his emotions or does something impulsive. If the majority of population is armed and have guns on them all the time, you get accidents and shootings because of that. They will attack to prove manhood or just because they are drunk or out of fear.
There are no studies showing that percentage of people carrying a firearm is in any way connected to the crime rate. Once you account for all the other variables, there isn't any correlation.
> There are no studies showing that percentage of people carrying a firearm is in any way connected to the crime rate. Once you account for all the other variables, there isn't any correlation.
Social science statistics are terrible. If you look at the statistic without controlling for anything, it's wrong. If you try to control for other factors, you can generally make the result be whatever you want.
There are multiple overlapping reasons for this.
One is that statistical controls, like statistics in general, don't reveal causation. If you want an effect to disappear, find something that correlates with the outcome and use it as a control. The effect disappears regardless of whether the control causes the outcome. The outcome can cause the control, or they can both have a shared cause, and you can still use it to erase the original effect. For example, do the demographics of the area affect the crime rate, or does the crime rate affect the demographics of the area?
There are also arbitrarily many things that could be controlled for. Taking some of them into account will make the original relationship weaker. Taking others into account will make the original relationship stronger. Looking at only the ones that move the needle in the direction you want it to move lets you move it in that direction.
If you really want to make something inconvenient disappear, just use the metric as the target. Audi claims its vehicles are safer than some competitors. Partisans collect data from two similar areas with a different rate of Audi ownership. The number of fatalities involving Audis is higher in the area with a higher number of Audis. Does this disprove Audi's safety claim?
When you have a politically charged issue like this, you can't pretend that one side's numbers are true and the side's aren't, when the truth is they're both biased and therefore both invalid.
This is a strong candidate for an adversarial collaboration, but to my knowledge this has not actually happened.
In this particular case, the thing is that both political sides have tried to do studies to prove their point. Most of those studies, as you say, are too biased to pay any attention to - they either cherry-pick data, or conveniently ignore some unrelated variables that could reasonably explain the effect, or involve convoluted models with a lot of subjective assumptions in them.
But every now and then, you get studies that don't do any of that. And then a funny thing happens: correlation disappears, regardless of who commissioned the study. Both sides vehemently object to these findings, which to me is a good sign that they are closer to the truth than anything else.
I am pro-armed-self-defense personally, and regularly carry concealed. But it would be a delusion for me to think that by doing so, I contribute to crime reduction.
> But every now and then, you get studies that don't do any of that. And then a funny thing happens: correlation disappears, regardless of who commissioned the study. Both sides vehemently object to these findings, which to me is a good sign that they are closer to the truth than anything else.
Neutrality bias is actually still bias. A lot of honest people do this by mistake, thinking that there should be balance and then seeking out things that create it and disregarding things that don't.
But when A says +5 and B says -5 and the truth is +3, the truth is still +3, not zero.
Sometimes things really do balance out exactly, but it's not very common. Round numbers are inherently suspicious.
> If you’re a criminal and know there is a 90% chance your target will be armed, will you attack?
American police assume the suspects they approach will be armed, since they have a Constitutional right to be. Does that stop the police from attacking, or do they just approach with caution and, when they attack, do so with overwhelming, asymmetrical force?
The police in the US a) don't attack people as often as it feels like, and b) know there is a good chance that the jury won't hold them responsible due a belief that police are inherently good. The police are not a valid comparison population.
> The police are not a valid comparison population.
In a theoretical US where the majority of people are armed and the threat of any attempted crime being met with armed resistance is a near certainty, one would have to assume that the justice system either doesn't function, or else would be extremely lenient to vigilantism. It would have to be a valid comparison if common citizens are filling the role of the police, because somehow in that scenario vigilantism isn't being counted as a rise in crime.
In any case, the point I was trying to make was not about the police per se, but the fact that the presence of an armed populace is one that can be tactically adapted to. Simply putting more guns in the hands of more people doesn't mean crime goes down, it just means crime involves more guns and more violence.
You need to come to Florida. Many people are armed. In the small cities and rural areas the places with the most crime are the places with the least amount of legal guns. For example, my home is in the last block of the historic district. On the other side of the street is the not-historic district.
As one might expect of historic homes, with their wood exteriors and cost of maintenance, many home owners have more than one gun. Crime is relatively low. This is especially true given there is no clear geographic demarker like a river or an interstate to stop crime.
As you travel a few blocks west up the common road, you get into burglaries and violence. You also find less licensed to carry individuals there. The unarmed are the prey of the armed.
How long does it take to draw a gun versus taking a second shot? Guns are great for offense, not so much for defense.
As with police in the US, the aggressor in an armed society have to be much more aggressive to get what they want and live. Robberies would drop. The criminals not willing to shoot first would find something else to do or transition into ones that shoot first. The violent crime that remained would be much more violent. This includes not only robberies, but also drunken disagreements, informal loans that have gone unpaid, etc. I don't think this is is a direction we want to go in. I mean, I appreciate the aesthetic, but I don't think it would work out very well.
I can draw and fire from my hip (and pocket) and hit center mass at 8 feet in two seconds. I also train to look like I'm cowering and reaching for my wallet in my back hip pocket.
As to the topic of crime, cities with high gun ownership tend to have lower crime. The US, for example, has far fewer hot home robberies, where hot means robbing while people are in the home. The UK has a higher percentage. The difference comes down to the risk of the homeowner fighting back.
Fatal Shootings involving police officers (not adjusted for population so lets be kind and multiply 3 by 8..).
UK (2015/2016 latest year I could find) - 3
US 2015 - 1052.
I'll take heavy gun control (guns are legal here, they are just controlled - If I wanted a license I could apply for one - requirement is legitimate reason (member of a shooting club qualifies) and no criminal background, 700,000 people have the license to own a gun with more than 1.5 million guns in private hands) thanks.
Sure we have a high burglary rate but that isn't to do with guns, it's do with more than a decade of destroying police budgets.
Figures from wikipedia/UN.
Oh and the one that amuses me in a black way, guns kill their owners (suicide) at a higher rate than they do anyone else in the US.
Also in the interests of clarity,
UK suicide rate 7.6 per 100,000
US suicide rate 21.8 per 100,000
with academic research showing that easy availability of firearms increases suicide rate.
The majority of which, as you point out, are suicides.
Also, measuring "gun deaths" is like measuring "blue car accidents" an an argument for restricting blue cars. A better metric might be something like "homicide rate" except that then you have to reckon with the fact that the US homicide rate is higher than the UK homicide rate even if you remove the US firearm homicides entirely, proving that the difference has causes other than access to firearms.
The same is true of the suicide rate. Even excluding US firearms suicides, the US still has a higher suicide rate than the UK. Moreover, preventing suicides by restricting access to firearms is certainly not a real solution -- it implies leaving people in such a despondent state that the only thing preventing suicide is lack of means. Addressing the underlying problem is still necessary, but is then also sufficient and obviates the supposed need to restrict access to firearms.
> this is certainly one of the reasons I'm still here today.
The point is that it's not. Getting to the point where access to means is the only remaining form of prevention implies that five other things have already failed in ways that never should have happened.
Those things sometimes do fail in practice, but that's what needs to be fixed. Because what about everyone who uses a different means?
And now the UK is starting to pass laws and regulations on kitchen knives because it turns out banning guns doesn’t actually fix underlying human nature.
Ok, so say someone wanted to rob you. Of course, now everyone has a gun. This would stop a lot of people from robbing you, but for others they might just shoot or stab you first. I guess crime is down, but stabbing and shootings are up.
Yes. If I was a criminal and I knew my target was be armed, then I would be much more likely to shoot, lest I be shot first. If you were not armed then I would have no reason to shoot you.
That’s quiet an escalation in both of mental ability to take a life and crime level. Armed robbery is lower than murder one. It’s also a jump to think that you’d go from relative coward to iron man murderer.
