[leephillips]

This article does a fairly convincing impression of being reasonable and balanced. However, a typical sentence is this one:

"And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer."

My hunch is that the author did very little real research or any analysis beyond the attempt to compare statistical enumerations that do not seem properly comparable. He's entitled to his "hunches", but they are not useful to me.

[summerdown2]

> My hunch is that the author did very little real research or any analysis beyond the attempt to compare statistical enumerations that do not seem properly comparable.

Assuming it could be carried out, what research would you find convincing?

[leephillips]

At a minimum I would like to see a clear statement of what hypothesis is being examined.

[summerdown2]

Hypothesis: removing guns from a society can be done to a tolerance of X within Y years. (i.e. there will always be some guns, but you can restrict them to rare status)

Hypothesis: doing so reduces deaths from A to B.

... assuming there could be a study of the above, and it came up with yes in both cases, and A >> B, would the case for gun control be made?

The question I'm asking is whether there is a study that would be acceptable, and gun control simply depends on whether this can be proven, or whether the question of reducing death is a red herring, and gun ownership is believed worth it regardless?

[leephillips]

Are these your proposals for research, or are they hypotheses that you claim the author was examining and that I somehow missed? If the former and you're looking for a critique, I would start by saying that I don't think hypothesis #1 is well posed. Do you mean any society, or the USA? And do you mean by any means at all, or only using legal, constitutional means?

In examining hypothesis #2, do we have available a sample of societies where guns were removed and nothing else changed, so we can perform a statistical analysis of the change in "death" rate following the sudden removal of guns? I think that's extremely unlikely, and therefore I don't see how we can reach reliable conclusions. Also, I'm confused about what you're proposing to look at: by "death", do you mean murder by gun? All murders? Suicides? Accidents, illness, etc.?

Of course we can be confident of tautologies: if all guns were made to disappear, including those in the hands of the government, there would not be any gun murders. But this does not seem very illuminating. Even in that case, how do we know that murders by other means, and other violent crimes, would not increase?

Your question is "whether there is a study that would be acceptable". I think the answer is clearly yes, and there are studies on this subject in the literature, of varying quality. My point was that the author seems not to know or care much one way or the other, and prefers to sling "hunches".

I'm not sure I understand anything that follows "acceptable", but I think you're wondering whether some people would be against a gun control measure even if it could be known that said measure would lead to a net decrease in murders. The answer to that (and I'm sorry if that's not what you were asking) is obviously "yes" in some cases. As an analogy, many people are harmed, even driven to suicide, by speech. This harm could possibly be reduced by enacting speech controls. But there are people who, even if they agree that a particular speech control measure would reduce harm caused by speech, would nevertheless be against it.