Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study
lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com
lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com
Once again, we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership. Rather, we assert a political causation for the observed correlation that nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns. The political causation is that nations which have violence problems tend to adopt severe gun controls, but these do not reduce violence, which is determined by basic socio‐cultural and economic factors.
Stringent gun control policies tend to appear in nations and/or regions where violence is already a problem. This study merely underlines the futility of any single tunnel-visioned policy - people who are willing to commit murder, are also willing to expend effort to find any weapon(s) to allow them to proceed in their endeavours.
Here in Finland, we have quite a few weapons, but they are rarely used in violent crimes. This nation tends to favour bladed weapons in their homicides: knives, axes and other things that are easy to pick up and use in drunken anger.
And, the grandparent commenter's comment duly considered, I still wouldn't easily dismiss a Finn's ability to use guns to kill people; see the White Death[1].
I saw a T-shirt that said "Guns don't kill people, Angry people kill people." and on the back it said "Chill out" and there was a marijuana leaf on it :-)
Once a person has gotten themselves to the state that they only solution they see to their hurt is to make someone else dead, it really doesn't matter, they are going to try to do that.
So, leaving aside the disjunction between a society in turmoil with strict but poorly enforced laws, there's the possibility than gun controls increase violent crime while reducing homicides, or the possibility that when lots of people get shot you tend to miss other stuff.
I've dug into a lot of the statistical data around gun fatilities in as many nations as possible including the United States. The biggest obstacle is that none of it is standardized. Violent crimes and gun violence is reported differently through municipalities and nations, association of criminal and non-criminal behavior is not effectively broken down. To be honest, it really makes me unsure as to how a lot of the media and political decisions are made.
For instance, nearly two thirds of all gun related deaths in the United States are suicides and gun statistics seem to typically be reported on an overall number versus a per capita basis.
Per capita, Finland has about the same number of guns as the US, approximately the same laws regarding guns and yet, their per capita homicide rate is substantially lower.
First, some background: I have friends who collect guns. Hell, one of them has a working replica of a light naval blackpowder cannon! My relatives are active and eager hunters, some of them own several different guns (2-3 shotguns, at least 2 different rifles).
Without even looking at statistics, I'm certain that per capita there are more active hunters in Finland than in US. This means that the lessons of use and care of firearms have come from people who by their nature are cautious with their weaponry. If you've been taken out to woods to hunt starting from your pre-teens, you have most likely learned to respect firearms. Not fear - just respect. And having been around actively used and maintained firearms, they may just lose some of their glory.
As to why I think we're going to see a slow rise in our gun homicide rate? There's a rather lengthy story behind that. Finland had their own private financial crisis in early 1990's. One of the victims of severe budget cuts was the youth mental healthcare. It's had even more cuts since then. We're now witnessing the second generation of Finns who haven't had the benefit of pre-1990's level of mental healthcare. There are more undiagnosed unstable people around now.
We've had two school shootings in the past few years. I don't see the situation getting better, so over the next decade we'll very likely see more premeditated gun crimes by people in their early 20's.
I don't have statistics or studies at hand, so please consider everything above my personal opinion.
Side note: I have a friend who grew up in Northern Finland and was hunting small game since a very early age (I think he said six or seven). He's introduced me to a lot of great Finnish things, like Paleface, salted black licorice and gravlax. I hope to visit there someday.
And it would be impossible to stop gun's from being imported from Latin American with it's renowned industrial base for manufacturing firearms.
Similarly, guns are nearing the 'grows on trees' level of simplicity with 3D printing.
[1] - http://i1178.photobucket.com/albums/x368/_ak_74_/shovel_ak/5...
As for the hilarious "assault shovel", my understanding was he made the receiver but purchased the barrel and most of the other parts. It just happens that because of US law, the receiver is the regulated part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurus_(manufacturer)
The gun my father most recently bought is from them (a 9mm 5 round revolver, a fairly nice piece of work).
Glocks are a remarkably high-density-value product. One cubic meter of quintessential Glocks (model 17 gen 4) would have a street value of at least US$500,000. This is typical of medium-quality handguns, whatever the make & model. A way to acquire & distribute them would be found.
ARs can be made from scratch with stuff bought from Lowes or Home Depot (or pretty much any decent hardware store). Go look up "80% AR receiver" for a good look. AK47s are much easier to make, and have equivalent gross performance.
There is of course the current meme regarding "3D printed guns". Not quite up to desired quality yet, but those involved in the project(s) are making amazing progress in a very short time.
All those types are at the upper end of complexity. Simpler designs (bolt/break/lever/revolver action) are much easier to make; we have a rich history of domestic manufacture thereof involving low-tech processes.
The only "hard part" about making guns is the barrel and primers. Hard, but not impossible for individuals.
Remember the spark that started the revolution resulting in the USA was, in fact, gun control (look up "Lexington and Concord"). Our culture of gun ownership by upstanding citizens is very deeply ingrained, and any suggestion of curtailing it is intensely opposed. Were all guns banned & confiscated within US borders, the rate of garage/basement gun manufacturing would be astounding.
Guns are simple machines. Get a cartridge into a rifled tube, provide sufficient structural support, impact the primer, bang. They're not hard to make. Quality manufacturing has raised our de facto expectations, but workable mundane products can be turned out by a guy with a lathe and a hacksaw. It's not magic.
How much harder? Technically, I'm not sure. However, Australia, England, and Germany, all of which have rather restrictive gun laws, don't seem to have that much of a problem with home built guns. Nor, as far as I know, do they have a large problem with illegally imported guns. They do, however, have problems with drugs.
Look, gun control has a lot of really stupid proponents(witness the assault weapon's ban on scary looking guns), but the argument that banning guns wouldn't work because prohibition of drugs failed is almost as stupid. It's almost as much of a blatant attempt at pandering to the liberal pro legalization crowd as the "think of the children" anti-gun stuff is to whoever listens to that crap. Countries have done it and it appears to work in so far as it does seriously reduce gun crime.
It's possible there are too many guns in the US to actually ban them, but that is not the argument of the "war on drugs" analogy. Furthermore, I think that's also moot. Criminals get arrested and get their guns confiscated, guns break, they get disposed off to avoid having evidence of a crime, the supply of extent criminal guns will dwindle. As to the large set of legal gun owners in the US, some of whom might have "boating accidents" and not turn in their guns, presumably they are not going to go out and start robbing connivence stores just because. Though I grant, this whole line of reasoning is a debatable point , but there is no real analogy to the war on drugs.
This doesn't mean prohibition is a good idea at all.
The question of course is 1) does it actually reduce violent crime and 2) even if it did, is it morally right to take away people's ability to defend themselves.
Never mind the fact that there are currently somewhere around 300 million firearms in private hands today in the US. It would take well over 100 years to get all of those out of circulation if you were somehow able to ban them today. And chances are the 80 million armed Americans wouldn't allow the government to take those guns anyway.
Pretty soon, we'll be entering an area where printable 3D guns are less likely to blow up in one's face, which raises the production costs a little bit in the short term, but which will likely result in even cheaper firearms manufacture.
Also interestingly, the areas immediately surrounding Kennesaw have the same levels of crime as ever, which illustrates that yes, they didn't solve crime, they only displaced it. On a crime map, there's a ring of 'red', like a corona, around the township proper. It's amazingly curious.
Without knowing which 4 cities you were citing, let's assume that we're talking about 4 Chicagos (the national worst), whose homicide tally for last year was 500 (435 gun-based), that means we could remove as much as 2,000 from the intentional homicide rate, which doesn't move us substantially along the scale, and certainly doesn't put is within even a couple dozen of the bottom of the list.
If we refine the parameters even to be more optimistic, and limit it from first-world countries with similar domestic output, it still doesn't push us substantially down the list to consider us even remotely "one of the lowest".
Of note, perhaps, is that I am a civil rights supporter, and I believe that the second amendment grants us the right to keep and bear arms without infringement. Regardless, I tried for a few days to make that claim reconcile with reality, and couldn't.
If anybody knows of the criteria chosen, I'd gladly re-do the numbers, but I feel it would have to stack the deck pretty deliberately to get even close to that outcome in actuality.
https://docs.google.com/a/migrantgeek.com/spreadsheet/oimg?k...
Might indeed be the tipping point. Thanks!
Now, to someone who lived in Arlington, Virginia for a dozen years the crime in PG was awful. To someone living in D.C. I strongly suspect PG was not bad at all, and being allowed to own a firearm in your house made I'm sure a significant difference.
Or take Boston, which the WASPs kept small after the Irish took over the city; without looking in more detail, the top level Wikipedia page indicates annexations stopped after 1874 with one non-WASP exception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park,_Boston).
"Less guns"? No one at Harvard would dare write such an ungrammatical headline -- this had to be the work of the submitter. And it is.
http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l...
This article also does not take into account areas in Africa, and the Middle East and instead focuses on Europe, which is greatly swayed due to the high level of murders in Russia.
This article should be called "In Europe More Guns != More Violence".
You are someone who is considering committing a crime. Let's say a robbery of a convenience store. You already own a gun. It doesn't matter how you acquired your gun, you already have it. You now have the choice of where to commit your crime. You can commit that crime in an area where it is illegal to own a firearm, and your victim will very likely not be able to defend himself, or you can commit that crime in an area where your victim can legitimately own a crime, and may shoot you if you try to rob him. Where do you choose to commit your crime?
Particularly from Virginia, which is correctly assumed to have a lot of gun owners, and since sometime in the '90s more than a few concealed carry licensees.
This is likely the reason that the Aurora shooter went 20 miles out of his way, passing both the closest theater to his home, and the largest theater in range, to perform his assault at the one theater in the (otherwise gun-loving) Aurora, Colorado area that specifically banned guns.
This is also a potentially contributing factor as to why a majority of mass murders are committed in areas labeled "gun free zones", like schools, college campuses, Fort Hood, etc.
Aren't those areas that are labeled "gun free zones" because it's easy to commit mass murder there? It's not the signage that makes it happen.
Schools might have ostensibly been labeled as 'gun free zones' as an attempt to stymie attempts at committing mass murder within them, but even if we can't prove their effectiveness, we can't deny that their lack of armed defenders makes them an attractive target for someone trying to inflict the most damage.
Edit: And for clarity, I wasn't suggesting that the signage causes mass murders to happen - but it does somewhat accentuate that if I were looking for somewhere to wreak havoc, I'd have little opposition in areas with 'gun free zone' signage.
My point was that gun control laws empower criminals because they know the odds their victims will have a gun to defend themselves are significantly lower.
There is growing evidence that criminals DO, at least to a meaningful degree (hey, they're criminals - most are stupid), choose their targets based on odds of the would-be victim fighting back. Of late and in particular, several mass murders have occurred in "gun-free zones" when more convenient/suitable (to the killer) venues existed but allowed civilian weapon carry.
Parallel answer to your question is that the measured violent crime rates you reference are too broad, aggregating a few small high-violence areas with broad low-violence zones, creating misguided statistics.
You live in a city that enforces gun control, and you know that the nearest convenience store holds a lot of cash after 8pm. The nearest city that doesn't enforce gun control is over a 1hr drive away in traffic, and you don't own a car. Do you (a) commit a crime of desperation at a local, familiar place, or (b) find a way to travel 20+ miles to knock over a liquor store?
Chicago would be a good example of this. To get from downtown Chicago to a nearby city without gun control might take an hour in a car, which our supposed criminal might not have access to. It seems to me that "locality of victim" is just as strong a determinant as "safety from retribution."
Being a criminal, its easy to add c) steal a car and abandon it when you're finished with it.
Is there some control for the possibility that those areas enacted firearm regulations due to already having a lot of violent crime?
Edit: It is addressed in the linked to document:
"But the more plausible explanation for many nations having widespread gun ownership with low violence is that these nations never had high murder and violence rates and so never had occasion to enact severe anti‐gun laws. On the other hand, in nations that have ex‐perienced high and rising violent crime rates, the legislative reaction has generally been to enact increasingly severe antigun laws" - (Bottom of Pg. 672)
A civilized society with low levels of poverty, good economic mobility, a good education system, a fair and effective judicial system and no drug war would mean there'd be less people committing violent acts in the first place.
When you're at the point where an armed citizen has to regularly thwart crime, you probably have major unresolved socioeconomic problems.
Not that I'm against a citizen's right to bear arms. Just saying that the goal should be to have less people motivated to commit crimes in the first place, not a bunch of would be criminals calculating whether or not they're going to encounter armed resistance.
Maybe its just the sad fact that bad news tends to travel more widely but I have yet to hear (on UK news) of a situation were an honest law abiding citizen has stopped a tragedy. I realize that their very intervention may have stopped a tragedy, making it not news worthy but I'm sure there should be more instances to justify that argument.
http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/06/customer_foils_ba...
So if you happened to be walking down the street with a knife and you were not a chef on the way to work, you could be arrested.
My favorite independent site was taken out by the Righthaven copyright trolls, but you can start with this: http://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/armed-citizen.aspx ; each item is from the media.
If your area is filled with good law-abiding citizens, you probably have lower crime rates.
Look, we can statistically show that everywhere someone has tried to do something about people getting injured with guns, there is more violent gun crime!
We must stop these surgeons! Clearly, by trying to help, they're causing the problem!
</sarcasm> <logicalFallacyReference name="post hoc ergo propter hoc" />
Second, the Hacker News article headline is, "Less guns = more violence." That is an absolute declaration of causation.
The linked article makes this assertion without any backing:
And enacting legislation without proper evidence supporting that it will have the desired effects can actually result in, as these studies show, the complete opposite.
The study does not show that. In fact:
we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership.
As close as they get in the report:
these [laws] do not reduce violence,
While the linked article claims that they increase violence.
TL;DR: The linked article makes false claims about what the report says, and the Hacker News article headline is just as bad or worse.
Its also not a structured analysis (or meta-analysis), but a polemic with footnotes.
Most European countries have fewer guns or no guns, and much lower levels of violence. But then, they're different people with different values -- the role of guns in their societies might be an effect, not a cause.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
- Legally held guns in England are generally owned by farmers, collectors and hunters. Those people predominantly live in rural areas, where crime is low. High rates of homicide generally occur in cities using illegal guns. So naturally you will see a negative correlation between LEGAL guns and violence. However it isn't the gun control legislation that is causing the increase in violence (LOL). In fact if you allowed teenagers in the shitty housing estates to legally own guns, I suspect you'd have a lot more homicides.
- Compare Canada to the USA. We have 1/3 of the legally held guns you have, and about 1/3rd of the homicide rate.
The Harvard study is simply stating that murder rates are not appreciably affected by gun control legislation, and that the big drivers of violence are socioeconomic.
Contrary to the headline (here and of the blog post), there is no Harvard study involved. If you can call the paper a study (which is, I think, somewhat dubious -- that implies a structured analysis or meta-analysis, which this is not) by two non-Harvard-affiliated scholars (one of which is affiliated with a right-wing think tank) published a student-run publication out of Harvard that bills itself as "the nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship."
BTW: there a LOT of not-anonymous gun-nuts on HN.
What I would expect to see would be a scatter graph showing all the countries in the world with guns on one axis and homicides on the other axis - that would make the article a bit more scientific rather than just cherrypicking a few countries. Most of their argument seems to be based on the fact that Russia has a high homicide rate and they have banned handguns. However we all know that Russia has law and order issues.
EDIT: I just did a quick search, and it seems there are graphs of homicides vs gun ownership for all countries, e.g. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns
So it certainly does look like gun ownership isn't correlated to homicide rates. However that doesn't necessarily mean that gun control is a bad idea. Does gun control reduce homicides when you control for other factors? The article is arguing that it does not, but my argument is that Canada vs USA shows that it does.
States with cities that have VERY strict gun laws: Illinois - 6.1 Michigan - 7.1 Louisiana - 12.4 (!)
States with lax gun laws: Montana - 1.8 Idaho - 2.5 North Dakota - 1.3
Now, admittedly, I cherry picked those to prove a point that you can blur the numbers to show what you want them to show, and I can just as easily pick numbers from strict gun law states with really low numbers and states with historically lax laws with higher numbers. We could go back and forth all day long like that, but I think that this paper, or whatever it is does make a pretty valid point which is that gun control doesn't really have the desired effect. Whether you look at entire countries, or individual states or municipalities, you will always find examples of strict gun laws with lots of violence, and no gun laws with almost no violence, and vice versa. We really just need to take a step back and realize that we are coming at this violence problem the wrong way and that the time, energy, and money we keep using to push for tighter gun control, is all wasted on something that likely would not work, and we're taking all those resources away from research we should be doing to find a real solution to the problem.
Links for the numbers I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...