To prevent another thread for being dragged further of topic and because opening up a hornets nest is a hobby of mine. Time to deal with gun control advocates and their arguments. First, what is a gun control advocate? I'd say it can be pretty wide from outright banning of guns of any type to controlling access. Most countries do have some type of laws in place about controlling access, but the question is how far should it go? A valid question, but for this thread I'll mostly deal with the strawmen presented about 'gun culture' and things of that nature. So time to get to work:
1. "The US has the highest murder rate of any western nation."
Be wary of anybody attempt to quote partial stats and not studying historical trends (as you should, if you want your policy to be taken seriously). In reality, violent crimes have been dropping across the US for decades now (see here for per 100,000 stats on criminal rates, in the US) while at the same time, the US has more guns than any nation in the world (around 90 per 100, from what I could find). There's been drops of murder rates, across the west, so for gun control advocates claims to make sense, they need to show their gun control polices are the cause. Since crime has been falling in the US too (where gun ownership remains high) there seems to be zero connection between drops in crime rates and stricter gun control policies. Likewise, expanding this to other crimes doesn't help either since crime rates have been dropping across the US too. This leads to number two:
2. What about other nations?
This is something that gun control advocates don't tend to address. They seem to only want to count nations that were part of the British Empire and/or western Europe. What about other countries? Russia's murder rate is at 11.2, Mexico is at 21.5, and Brazil is at 25.2. What about their gun control laws? Countries tend to have quite a bit of differences between gun control laws, but Russia, Mexico, and Brazil already have gun control measures in place (with Russia and Mexico having stricter ones than the US does and Brazil has gun control laws in the books too. Likewise, Serbia has very loose gun control laws and yet has a murder rate of 1.2. Clearly again, gun control advocates are very selective with their data and don't seem to go any further. With this though, there's still other things that need addressing.
There's other points that do need to be addressed, but these are a good starting point and makes it pretty clear that gun control seems to have very little link to the drop of criminal rates over the past 2 and half decades can't be claimed on gun control policy.
1. "The US has the highest murder rate of any western nation."
Be wary of anybody attempt to quote partial stats and not studying historical trends (as you should, if you want your policy to be taken seriously). In reality, violent crimes have been dropping across the US for decades now (see here for per 100,000 stats on criminal rates, in the US) while at the same time, the US has more guns than any nation in the world (around 90 per 100, from what I could find). There's been drops of murder rates, across the west, so for gun control advocates claims to make sense, they need to show their gun control polices are the cause. Since crime has been falling in the US too (where gun ownership remains high) there seems to be zero connection between drops in crime rates and stricter gun control policies. Likewise, expanding this to other crimes doesn't help either since crime rates have been dropping across the US too. This leads to number two:
2. What about other nations?
This is something that gun control advocates don't tend to address. They seem to only want to count nations that were part of the British Empire and/or western Europe. What about other countries? Russia's murder rate is at 11.2, Mexico is at 21.5, and Brazil is at 25.2. What about their gun control laws? Countries tend to have quite a bit of differences between gun control laws, but Russia, Mexico, and Brazil already have gun control measures in place (with Russia and Mexico having stricter ones than the US does and Brazil has gun control laws in the books too. Likewise, Serbia has very loose gun control laws and yet has a murder rate of 1.2. Clearly again, gun control advocates are very selective with their data and don't seem to go any further. With this though, there's still other things that need addressing.
There's other points that do need to be addressed, but these are a good starting point and makes it pretty clear that gun control seems to have very little link to the drop of criminal rates over the past 2 and half decades can't be claimed on gun control policy.
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