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by glenra 4975 days ago
> Try living in a country with gun control laws for a bit and see where you feel safer.

You mean like the UK? The UK has a horrendous violent crime rate - four times that of the US. So if people were "afraid" in proportion to actual risk, they should be more afraid there than in the US, no?

(random news story about that: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-... )

Or do you mean like Sweden? Sweden's reported rape rate is about twice that of the US.

I actually do live in a country with gun control laws. I live in New York City. And I don't own a gun. But that doesn't mean I have to accept unfounded claims about how bad guns are.

The truth is that the statistics are ambiguous. Every time gun laws change in the US, partisans claim it'll have a huge effect but the actual effect is hard to measure. Florida didn't become "the gunshine state" when they liberalized CCWs. (Rape rates did somewhat decrease there, but it's hard to connect that reliably to the change) On the margin, neither tightening NOR loosening gun laws is a panacea.

I'm not sure whose "consensus" you're referring to, but it's not the consensus of criminologists. The gradual loosening of CCW restrictions nationwide came only after very careful study repeatedly determined there's no significant increase in violence when more people are carrying hidden guns. You're free to believe there's some sort of "threshold effect", that if we got gun ownership levels below some magic number X, that suddenly everything would be better then, but at this point that's just an article of faith - there's no math supporting it.
1 comments
jacquesm 4975 days ago
You pick the worst from a huge region and then use that to argue the case for the whole region (EU).

Just homicides:

http://chartsbin.com/view/1454

Intentional homicides:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

Using Sweden as an example to argue high rape incidence is ridiculous because Sweden classes things as rape that are not counted as rape in any other country in the world. See also: Julian Assange, aka the trouble of travelling unprotected in Sweden.

Check out the statistics on Australia pre and post the gun laws.

And if you have nothing better to do, a nice bit of reading on the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries:

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/Compiling-an...

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glenra 4975 days ago
> You pick the worst from a huge region and then use that to argue the case for the whole region (EU).

It only takes one counterexample to disprove a rule. If you meant to say "try living somewhere in the EU...but not the UK", you should have said that.

> Check out the statistics on Australia pre and post the gun laws.

Yeah, not so much. This is a fine example of seeing what you want to see in the data, rather than what's actually there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Conte...

> the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries

Hey, I'm with you on that one - I only mentioned a couple specific countries in response to you bringing the subject up as if it meant something important.

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