It illustrates the 2 divurgent lines comparing guns per capita and gun murders per capita. Visually representing that "More guns equals less crime." It sources ATF and FBI data. Guns per capita is the upward trending line, the wavy line is murder, with an averaging slope running through it, trending lower.
Now if you extend the lines out will the effect remaing the same? Hardly. Not indefinitely. Eventually the mirder graph will approach zero but flatten out. If you added a billion guns to the country you wouldn't get a negative crime rate.
And correlation doesn't always mean causation, naturally. It might be some other factor driving BOTH lines. Like a mindset of society that discourages crime might also tolerate or encourage private gun ownership, and this mindselt started in the late 60's.
If you threw a lot of guns into responsible citizens hands in, say, Britain, you might not see the same effect on gun crime.
Still. It'd be fun to play with these numbers. We'd need more data sets in country with different cultures. To truly test it, we'd need the opposite data set. We'd have to evaluate the US with fewer guns per capita and see if crime rate increases. And that's not something you want to actually TRY. To try and increase the US crime rate, that is, just to prove a theory.
But to start, I'd like to read the whole book... It looks encouraging. Unless the Brady's have debumked data in it as made up out of whole clothe. That would invalidate any conclusions. But it's only allies of the Brady's that commit that sort of fraud to fit their agenda. Our side occasionally stretches the actual data to reach conclusions we like, but not so very often, and I don't think we've ever faked data. And it would be stupid to fake recent FBI data, it is so easy to check.
I remain highly skeptical of any study that does not take into account unique participants (recidivism) or all violent crime rates (at the very least) along with the murder rate. I am skeptical regardless of whether or not a study supports my views.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why so many experts insist on the existence of an impenetrable wall between murder and all other crimes, whenever the discussion involves guns. A jury can turn a justifiable homicide into a murder if the prosecution brings those charges. An armed robbery can become a murder if the victim isn't so lucky. An assault where the victim is being threatened with a weapon can become a murder with the application of bad trigger discipline. Or an intended murder can become a suicide if the gun malfunctions and the perpetrator looks down the bore while pulling the trigger.
So maybe the fewer murders is attributed to a lack of universal military conscription... People aren't trained by Uncle Sam, and the subset of people that are murderers are missing a lot...
ReplyDelete