Tears of Blood said:
I did a presentation on this for Sociology class.
Basically, I was pretty biased, because if you do the reasearch, you learn that areas that impose more gun control laws end up with not just more homicides via firearm, but homicides in general! It's completely crazy.
I challenge that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate shows the death rates across countries.
The US has nearly double that of any other country, but we're not controlling for biases here like degrees of urbanisation, which increases availability of otherwise difficult items like weapons, which leads to situations like Brazil's statistics being even higher than America's.
It is interesting to take the UK as a comparative case study. Even in Northern Ireland, a region fraught with Civil war and violence over the statistical period, America had nearly twice the gun deaths per capita and that region can be seen as anomalous given the remarkably low figures of at least twenty times lower than the US death rate in England, Scotland and Wales, which should be subject to the same laws.
I also note that these statistics: http://www.the-eggman.com/writings/death_stats.html show 2.7% of Firearm deaths are due to Accidental Discharge, that's one in every 37 gun deaths, of which there are 28,663 in that survey. What that tells me is there are many people in the US who are not educated properly to deal with guns, yet have them anyway.
I understand the US is not like every other country on the planet, most countries do not have anything like the level of military service the US does, where the combined Armed Forces and Reserves, being people trained as military and able to potentially access military grade resources is 2,295,000 or one in every 90 people of age to serve (between 18 and 64 to use easily accessible demographic data) is in some form of active military service. This does not account for those who have left service.
Compare this once again to Britain, which has roughly a tenth the size of the armed forces (around 225,000), but very close to 1/5 the population, meaning roughly for every British soldier there are two US ones. So for every two Americans trained to use guns, there is one Brit. Perhaps this has something to do with the relative powers of the Gun lobbies and the second amendment and also why even in the worst parts of Britain, they still can not reach the levels of gun related violence the US can. Clearly, there must be some difference between the two and Gun Control being in one country, but not the other is a strong candidate for a reason. It doesn't statistically bear out, but it's why many people are in favour of it, becuase of the underlying factors in a society which pushes for gun control restraining the society's use of weapons. Even Canada, the country closest to the US, both geographically and in mindset only has 40% of the gun related death.
Accidents happen and the more available guns are, the more likely they are to be used to resolve something which might not have otherwise resulted in death. Yes, criminals are going to use guns, just like they're going to break into your house. A determined enough criminal will not be stopped by a lock on a door in the same way they won't avoid using illegal guns. A lock on a door is a mild deterrent so random people have to go to effort to commit a crime, the same ideology applies to gun control, make it more of an effort to get guns and there are less guns.
