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> Even if the UK and Japan had very high gun rates of gun ownership, it is unlikely they would have rates of gun crime as high as those of the USA. It is in fa

> Even if the UK and Japan had very high gun rates of gun ownership, it is unlikely they would have rates of gun crime as high as those of the USA. It is in fact quite possible that they would, particularly for the UK. The gun-enabled wild-west culture may well be the single most important root of the crime problem in the US. You're not helping your case here. > For example, if we consider the UK's 1988 Firearms Act, which banned semi-automatic rifles You can't extrapolate microscopic data from a country with an 86-fold lower death rate. The way very few gun enthusiasts react to additional UK restrictions teaches us absolutely nothing about what would happen if the US adopted the UK's laws and cleaned up the gun mess. My expectation would be a 50-fold reduction in the death rate within 20 years.

solidsnack9000 2y ago
It sounds like you sincerely believe that gun ownership causes other kinds of crime. For example, robbery, shoplifting, simple assault and so on. This isn't easy to support with data either within the USA or across countries. For example, consider Canada, the UK, Finland, and Switzerland. These countries have great differences between them in the gun ownership rate and the types of guns that are allowed to be owned, but they all have rates of violent crime that are much lower than the USA. Within the USA, two of our safest states -- New Hampshire and Massachusetts -- are right next to each other. While New Hampshire has some of the most permissive gun laws in the country, Massachusetts has among the most restrictive. It is not reasonable at all to conclude that Japan or the UK would, if gun ownership were more permissible, have the same high rates of murder, armed robbery or related crimes as the USA. In the case of the UK, interestingly enough, we actually have quite a lot to go on, here. The UK had much more permissive gun policies earlier in the 1900s but still had lower rates of murder, &c, than the USA. My expectation would be a 50-fold reduction in the death rate within 20 years. But how do you support that? You criticised my data, calling it microscopic -- although millions of people live in the UK, and you earlier offered data about the UK to support your position -- but what would suggest a 50-fold decrease like that following any gun policy change whatsoever, over any length of time whatsoever?
- hollerith 2y ago
  >The UK had much more permissive gun policies earlier in the 1900s but still had lower rates of murder, &c, than the USA. Well, sure, but that is not particularly informative on predicting how much US violence would go down if the US started banning guns: the informative bit of info is how much UK violence went down after the UK started banning guns.
  - solidsnack9000 2y ago
    It didn't go down, though. What makes you think it went down?
    - hollerith 2y ago
      I didn't say it went down.
- worstspotgain 2y ago
  Pervasive gun ownership begets gun ownership among criminals. The decision-making in whether to hold up a liquor store is intuitively different if you already own a gun. The spillover effect may be smaller for crimes like graffiti. However, police in the UK are less busy with serious crimes, so they can probably police graffiti better too. Then there's the Broken Windows theory. There is an independent variable (gun ubiquity) and an intuitively-related dependent variable (gun deaths.) The international data fit the association very strongly. You're not going to convince anyone that they're not related. There are other factors at play but they are minute by comparison. The 50-fold decrease is just my spitballing of where the US would fall on the graph, i.e. pretty close to the line where all the other countries are.
  - solidsnack9000 2y ago
    It seems like you're trying to derive it all from a comparison of the USA to the UK; but there are many countries with quite different firearms policies from the UK while having similarly low rates of violent crime.

solidsnack9000 2y ago

It sounds like you sincerely believe that gun ownership causes other kinds of crime. For example, robbery, shoplifting, simple assault and so on. This isn't easy to support with data either within the USA or across countries. For example, consider Canada, the UK, Finland, and Switzerland. These countries have great differences between them in the gun ownership rate and the types of guns that are allowed to be owned, but they all have rates of violent crime that are much lower than the USA. Within the USA, two of our safest states -- New Hampshire and Massachusetts -- are right next to each other. While New Hampshire has some of the most permissive gun laws in the country, Massachusetts has among the most restrictive. It is not reasonable at all to conclude that Japan or the UK would, if gun ownership were more permissible, have the same high rates of murder, armed robbery or related crimes as the USA. In the case of the UK, interestingly enough, we actually have quite a lot to go on, here. The UK had much more permissive gun policies earlier in the 1900s but still had lower rates of murder, &c, than the USA. My expectation would be a 50-fold reduction in the death rate within 20 years. But how do you support that? You criticised my data, calling it microscopic -- although millions of people live in the UK, and you earlier offered data about the UK to support your position -- but what would suggest a 50-fold decrease like that following any gun policy change whatsoever, over any length of time whatsoever?

hollerith 2y ago
>The UK had much more permissive gun policies earlier in the 1900s but still had lower rates of murder, &c, than the USA. Well, sure, but that is not particularly informative on predicting how much US violence would go down if the US started banning guns: the informative bit of info is how much UK violence went down after the UK started banning guns.
- solidsnack9000 2y ago
  It didn't go down, though. What makes you think it went down?
  - hollerith 2y ago
    I didn't say it went down.
worstspotgain 2y ago
Pervasive gun ownership begets gun ownership among criminals. The decision-making in whether to hold up a liquor store is intuitively different if you already own a gun. The spillover effect may be smaller for crimes like graffiti. However, police in the UK are less busy with serious crimes, so they can probably police graffiti better too. Then there's the Broken Windows theory. There is an independent variable (gun ubiquity) and an intuitively-related dependent variable (gun deaths.) The international data fit the association very strongly. You're not going to convince anyone that they're not related. There are other factors at play but they are minute by comparison. The 50-fold decrease is just my spitballing of where the US would fall on the graph, i.e. pretty close to the line where all the other countries are.
- solidsnack9000 2y ago
  It seems like you're trying to derive it all from a comparison of the USA to the UK; but there are many countries with quite different firearms policies from the UK while having similarly low rates of violent crime.