“The NRA say that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. I think the gun helps. Just standing and shouting BANG! That’s not gonna kill too many people.”
- Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill (1999)
When convenient projectile launching killing tubes aren't available, Homo Sapiens will rapidly revert to 10,000+ year old murder methods, and thus a husband inflamed with murder-rage who just learned his wife's ovaries have been voluntarily fertilized by another man's semen will not infrequently use punches or a nearby blunt object (hammer or rock) to fracture her skull and destroy her brain function, or use his hands to crush her windpipe, or bleed her out with a knife. This has been happening essentially every year for at least the past 10,000 years. If his wife had been armed with a handheld projectile launching killing tube she could have defended herself, but women frequently don't carry projectile tubes and frequently vote for restricting access to projectile tubes, because projectile tubes are loud and scary and make them feel unsafe.
Maintain the purity of your bodily fluids, friend!
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/mur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_Uni...
We welcome you immigrate here, where people are illegal to possession any weapon other than kitchen knives, and you are fully protected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
In 2016, China issued 1,576 permanent residency cards. This was more than double what it had issued the previous year, but still roughly 750 times lower than the United States’ 1.2 million.
And before you point to Switzerland, I am all for gun ownership by certified, well trained, responsible citizens. But the US doesn't have that. Either decrease access to guns, or enact 2 years of compulsory military service where you are trained to respect your weapon and know precisely when and how to responsibly use it AND store it. If you do neither, you get the US.
And in either case, we need to improve the mental wellbeing of everyone in the US by giving more people access to "free" healthcare and not stigmatizing mental health.
Some people seem to be blind to the fact that less penalty and defunded/broken police and justice system lowers the cost of killing (by making it hard to bring murder to justice and the due penalty) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/world/europe/anders-breiv...
That isn't germane. If the rate of something fluctuates without connection to the action taken to change the rate, then the action isn't effective or is confounded by other more significant factors.
Izzard's implicit conjecture is that if guns are not present, then murder is less likely (please let me know if I am misunderstanding it). Izzard's country of primary domicile is England which has a recent history of making guns less available. However, the murder rate in England appears to increase and decrease without regard to the timing of key legislation. Since a murder may or may not be performed with a gun, if murders do not decrease in the absence of guns then it follows that a gun may be a particular method but is not necessary for the commission of a murder.
I suppose a counterfactual could be asserted: the murder rate would have been even higher without England's gun laws. I suppose that is possible and would be plausible with more information about the natural variation in murder rates of various methods. Maybe something like Narwal tusks aren't a replacement for guns but have their own natural rate of usage in murders.