Re: Gun Rights Are Favored Over Gun Control For First Time In 20 Years, Poll Finds
1. It only talks about banning guns and doesn't recognize a ton of other regulation and control options.Originally Posted by Phier
2. It only takes a very basic comparison of Nation state level comparisons and doesn't account for confounding variables like socio-economic level and culture.
3. It also doesn't take into account facts like Switzerland and Norway have a huge percentage of their populations (far more than the US) as former military due to conscription and thus the majority of those populations have two years or more of military training. Also more of those guns are rifles and shotguns than handguns.
Essentially that single article comes nowhere near countering all the evidence we actually have available:
Franklin Zimring provided systematic evidence that theweapon type matters independent of motivation. Zimring drew on crime data
from Chicago to show that case-fatality rates in gun attacks are a multiple of
those in knife attacks, despite the fact that the circumstances are generally similar.
Many criminal assailants were inebriated at the time and thus unlikely to
be acting in a calculating fashion, and few attackers administered more than one
or two wounds to the victim—even in fatal cases. Similarly, robberies are far
more likely to result in the victim’s death if a gun is involved, even though gun
robbers are less likely to attack their victim than those armed with another
weapon.24 Inflicting a fatal wound with a gun requires less effort, determination,
involvement, or strength than with other common weapons.Perhaps the question of primary interest to individual citizens is whether
guns make the owners and members of their household more or less safe. One
type of evidence in support of the claim that guns increase the risk of homicide
victimization comes from comparing gun ownership rates of homicide
victims with those of neighbors who share similar sociodemographic characteristics.(Kellerman 1993 and others)Some of the problems with cross-section studies can be overcome by using
panel data—repeated cross-sections of city, county, or state data measured at
multiple points in time—to compare changes in gun ownership with changes in
crime. Compared with Massachusetts, the state of Mississippi may have much
higher homicide rates year after year for reasons that cannot be fully explained
by standard sociodemographic or other variables. But by comparing changes
across areas we implicitly control for any unmeasured differences across areas
that are relatively fixed over time, such as a “Southern culture of violence.”42 The
reverse causation problem, in which crime may be both cause and effect of gun
ownership, can be at least partially addressed within this “fixed effects” frame-work by relating changes in gun ownership this year with changes in crime rates next year.The best available evidence on the relationship between gun prevalence and
crime comes from a recent paper by Mark Duggan, which reports that more
guns lead to more homicides. Duggan’s measure of local gun ownership
rates—gun magazine subscriptions per capita—is highly correlated with surveybased
estimates of gun ownership. He finds that a 10 percent increase in gun
prevalence in one year increases a county or state’s homicide rate the next year
by around 2 percent but has little effect on other types of crime. This result accords
with the belief that while guns do not contribute much to the overall volume
of crime, they do make it more lethal.Reuter and Mouzos report that Australia’s policy resulted in the destructionof a large percentage of prohibited long guns, reducing the nation’s overall stock of guns by as much as 20 percent. The average homicide rate has been lower in
the years following the initiation of the ban (1997–2001) than during the five
years before, and the proportion of homicides with guns has continued a secular
decline since the ban. Given the very small numbers involved (about fifty gun
homicides a year) it is difficult to reach any firm conclusions about the effects of
the ban. The trends are compatible with a conclusion that the ban and buyback
saved lives, but that conclusion cannot be offered with great confidence. But there
is absolutely no evidence that the Australian policy innovations had a perverse
effect, as has sometimes been claimed.In chapter 3 we move beyond crude international comparisons and examine
how burglary patterns within the United States relate to the prevalence of gun
ownership. We use both National Crime Victimization Survey data on residential burglary and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports panel data on burglaries reported to the police. Using a variety of statistical methods to deal with the problems
of confounding variables and reverse causation, we conclude that an increase
in gun prevalence has no effect on the likelihood that a residential burglary involves
an occupied dwelling (a “hot” burglary), while it appears to have, if anything,
a positive effect on the overall rate of residential burglary. Our tentative
explanation for that surprising conclusion is that guns are valuable loot and that
gun-rich communities are especially profitable to burglars.http://home.uchicago.edu/ludwigj/pap...n_Chapter1.pdfSome licensed gun dealers are willing accomplices to gun trafficking or straw
purchases, or are selling to criminals off the books.62One ATF investigation of the
relatively small subset of dealers who account for the original retail sale of most
crime guns submitted for tracing found that 75 percent were in violation of at least
one federal regulation. Although most of these were for minor violations, 20 percent
of dealers in this sample were recommended for license revocation.
“Our analysis shows that having access to firearms is a significant risk factor for men committing suicide and for women being victims of homicide,” saidAndrew Anglemyer, PhD, MPH, an expert in study design and data analytics in Clinical Pharmacy and Global Health Sciences at UCSF, who is also a U.S. Army veteran. “Since empirical data suggest that most victims of homicide know their assailants, the higher risk for women strongly indicates domestic violence.”Of the 15 studies included in the meta-analysis, the only one that did not find a statistically meaningful increase in the odds of death associated with access to firearms was from New Zealand, where guns are much less available than they are in the United States. And even that study did find an increase, although not a statistically significant one
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2014/01/111...icide-homicide
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rather than having a legit discussion.
