[saladeen]

GP asked about relation of gun laws vs death numbers. You are pretending to answer that, but you weasel in the change from 'general violence' to 'gun violence'. Of course if guns are more easily available, there will be more gun violence, but that's not what GP asked.

[mattbrewsbytes]

I believe the less deaths part is really meant as gun deaths.

Do you honestly think that he wants information about less guns leading to lower cardiac arrests? Or perhaps less motor vehicle accidents involving death?

There is only one type of death that is in context in a discussion about firearms, death caused by firearms.

[saladeen]

We are discussing crime. If crime wasn't commited by firearms, there would be no need to have legal framework regulating firearms. However, once firearms are heavily regulated, the violence commited through use of firearms doesn't magically go away. Violent criminals just switch to other methods.

You can see similar things happening in UK recently, where they had a heavy campaign on banning knifes. This has resulted in increased use of acid attacks in gang/criminal violence.

[mattbrewsbytes]

The original comment was:

"The same willful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to ..."

I was merely pointing out that haggy's comment ("I would love to see hard statistical evidence that less guns = less deaths...") was an exact example of this willful ignorance. The fact that we are discussing gun death/violence isn't really the point.

The point is that there are policies/laws working in other areas of the world and its kinda silly to outright dismiss them because "its different here" etc.

There will always be violent criminals. My belief is if there are less firearms, there are less choices for those criminals to easily commit violence. I would think survival chances when a criminal is attacking with a knife are much higher than if they had a gun.

[irishsultan]

> I would think survival chances when a criminal is attacking with a knife are much higher than if they had a gun.

The problem with this statement is that it is injecting an untested hypothesis in a discussion about the lack of facts when making policy.

[irishsultan]

This may seem obvious to you, but it certainly isn't to me.

You are right that natural deaths are unlikely to be affected, but it's entirely possible for other kinds of death to be affected (e.g. if I can't shoot you I may stab you to death). The appropriate category to compare would be violent deaths.