| This article is misleading in many ways. For example: * They compare gun homicide instead of absolute homicide. Are we expected to believe that killers, in the absence of firearms, decide that maybe they'll be peaceful and productive members of society instead? * They do not perform any normalization whatsoever. Not only do they fail to account for cultural differences that might affect all forms of homicide and/or crime in general, they don't adjust for population size at all * They happily compare gun ownership rates in the US with conflict-dense areas like Yemen, but make no effort to correlate this with crime rates, which they only compare between "rich" countries. * The title states that Japan has "virtually eliminated shooting deaths" but provides no evidence that shooting deaths were ever a serious problem in Japan * The article implies that "a land without guns" having next to no shooting deaths, a logical truism, is a useful observation in the absence of any correlation with actual crime rates, let alone normalized ones. Whatever your opinions about gun control may be, it should be clear that the author has some very strong ones, and isn't afraid of pushing them with misleading publications. |