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Liberalizing gun ownership has been researched to death and everybody just ignores the research as convenient for their personal opinion. The stats repeatedly s

Liberalizing gun ownership has been researched to death and everybody just ignores the research as convenient for their personal opinion. The stats repeatedly say the same several things: * crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally, but by far less than most firearm advocates claim. * though, the most dramatic of that decrease is related to violent crime as some arguments might claim. * when firearms become more lawfully common police are slightly more likely to be victims of violent crime. * the numbers related to crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny even for high population density large cities indicating many arguments on the subject are exaggerated to fit a narrative.

clircle 6y ago
Can you share your sources?
yowlingcat 6y ago
This makes a lot of sense intuitively, and I've kinda arrived at the same conclusions. What are your favorite sources to share with others about this?
- austincheney 6y ago
  I like an article I read about on Arstechnica several years back.
  - loginatnine 6y ago
    Funny you mention people ignoring research yet you failed to mention a proper source (an arstechnica article is not (though the sources of this article might be)) for your claims.
loginatnine 6y ago
Please provide your sources for these claims.
- austincheney 6y ago
  One of the better articles on this subject came from Arstechnica several years back.
  - candiodari 6y ago
    They have a whole set of articles, both positive and negative ... But that's not research. https://arstechnica.com/tag/gun-control/ https://arstechnica.com/tag/gun-control/
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      Not wrong, but many of Ars' science-y articles tend to have DOIs at the bottom.
newacct583 6y ago
Those numbers are, almost certainly, all within the US (or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?). Because the data globally points the other direction. The overwhelmingly largest factor, across every nation we have data for, in determining how many people get shot is how many guns there are, period. More guns means more shootings. 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".
- hntrader 6y ago
  > in determining how many people get shot 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.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    What is the "actual argument" then? Gun deaths are... pretty bad. Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no? 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.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      > Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no 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.
hntrader 6y ago
> crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally Has this been established through natural experiment?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Daho0n 6y ago
Citation needed.
LorenPechtel 6y ago
Yup. There's little overlap between legally owned guns and guns used in crime. Gun laws obviously have little effect on guns that aren't legally owned in the first place.
- pandem 6y ago
  I don't think that is obvious at all. I would assume most illegally owned guns have been legally owned in the first place so gun laws can have a big effect.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Can you explain how?
    - ralusek 6y ago
      People legally buy guns and then distribute them illegally.
      - zepto 6y ago
        Sure but the GP’s point they there is little overlap is correct. Out of approx 400,000,000 guns, only very roughly 12,000 are used in crime. There is less than 0.01% overlap.
        jdkee 6y ago
        Not sure where you got this number from. The US had 13,500 firearm homicides in 2018. https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html If you include the number of persons shot but not killed directly you are looking at about 20x that number. And that doesn’t include firearms used in other crimes of violence.
        zepto 6y ago
        If your numbers are correct, the overall point still stands.
blablabla123 6y ago
You can almost randomly choose a European country and disprove your argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.
- caeril 6y ago
  Priorities are important. Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents). I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-. I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart. Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem. Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control. edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2]. [1] https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between mill- and micro Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.

clircle 6y ago

Can you share your sources?

yowlingcat 6y ago

This makes a lot of sense intuitively, and I've kinda arrived at the same conclusions. What are your favorite sources to share with others about this?

austincheney 6y ago
I like an article I read about on Arstechnica several years back.
- loginatnine 6y ago
  Funny you mention people ignoring research yet you failed to mention a proper source (an arstechnica article is not (though the sources of this article might be)) for your claims.

loginatnine 6y ago

Please provide your sources for these claims.

austincheney 6y ago
One of the better articles on this subject came from Arstechnica several years back.
- candiodari 6y ago
  They have a whole set of articles, both positive and negative ... But that's not research. https://arstechnica.com/tag/gun-control/ https://arstechnica.com/tag/gun-control/
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    Not wrong, but many of Ars' science-y articles tend to have DOIs at the bottom.

newacct583 6y ago

Those numbers are, almost certainly, all within the US (or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?). Because the data globally points the other direction. The overwhelmingly largest factor, across every nation we have data for, in determining how many people get shot is how many guns there are, period. More guns means more shootings. 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".

hntrader 6y ago
> in determining how many people get shot 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.
- newacct583 6y ago
  What is the "actual argument" then? Gun deaths are... pretty bad. Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no? 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.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    > Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no 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.

hntrader 6y ago

> crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally Has this been established through natural experiment?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Daho0n 6y ago

Citation needed.

LorenPechtel 6y ago

Yup. There's little overlap between legally owned guns and guns used in crime. Gun laws obviously have little effect on guns that aren't legally owned in the first place.

pandem 6y ago
I don't think that is obvious at all. I would assume most illegally owned guns have been legally owned in the first place so gun laws can have a big effect.
- zepto 6y ago
  Can you explain how?
  - ralusek 6y ago
    People legally buy guns and then distribute them illegally.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Sure but the GP’s point they there is little overlap is correct. Out of approx 400,000,000 guns, only very roughly 12,000 are used in crime. There is less than 0.01% overlap.
      - jdkee 6y ago
        Not sure where you got this number from. The US had 13,500 firearm homicides in 2018. https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html If you include the number of persons shot but not killed directly you are looking at about 20x that number. And that doesn’t include firearms used in other crimes of violence.
        zepto 6y ago
        If your numbers are correct, the overall point still stands.

blablabla123 6y ago

You can almost randomly choose a European country and disprove your argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.

caeril 6y ago
Priorities are important. Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents). I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-. I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart. Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem. Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control. edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2]. [1] https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between mill- and micro Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.