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Re:He's crazy but... by shutdown+-p+now · 2013-04-25 18:53 · Score: 1 · on 3D-Printed Gun May Be Unveiled Soon

lucky enough to be in a country that has proven gun laws work.

Can you explain then why your gun control laws have not had any meaningful reflection in your homicide rates, or your general violent crime stats?

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/violent%20crime.html

Re:Which Europeans? by shutdown+-p+now · 2013-03-04 06:33 · Score: 1 · on 'Download This Gun' — 3-D Printed Gun Reliable Up To 600 Rounds

At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem with guns is that they make it far, far too easy to kill someone. In a country like the UK where I live, a disagreement or fight might end up with someone getting punched; it is fantastically unlikely to end with someone getting shot.

You missed the point of my question. You were talking about how you have "less gun crime" - i.e. you looked at the actual numbers (commendable!) instead of just saying that guns obviously cause more murders; but then chose to focus on a narrow category of murders instead of all of them. Why not look at all murders? In the end, that's what matters.

Case in point - in Australia, after their 1996 gun ban and mandatory buyback, all anti-gun organizations in US were proudly proclaiming that it "significantly reduced gun crimes". Which it did, but if you looked at the whole picture, the total number of murders actually increased (and so did the number of assaults, rapes and suicides). They just weren't gun crimes, and so they weren't counted. But from utilitarian perspective, your goal should be to decrease the total number, not one particular subcategory. If statistics show that the same number of people die, just from knives rather than guns, your policy didn't have any meaningful effect.

By the way, if you don't trust me and want to go look the numbers up - you will quickly find that murder rate in Australia today is lower than it was immediately before the ban (but still higher than a decade before that). It spiked somewhere in 2002, IIRC, and then returned to its usual downward progression common for all developed countries, at the same rate it was going down before the ban. Ditto suicides. If you want to see the whole picture, don't look at specific points in time only - find graphs, preferably for at least a couple of years before the ban went in effect, so that you can see the trends as well as changes. E.g. this, this and this (taken from here).

Gun-lovers can protest all they like, the fact is that the murder rate in the US is much higher than in comparable Western countries.

The fact is that there's no evidence that specifically points out at guns as the factor that causes that higher murder rate. There are numerous differences between countries like US and UK, and some of them - e.g. much higher wealth and income disparity in US, or lack of efficient public healthcare system - are known to be considerable contributors to more and stronger poverty in US, and poverty correlates very well with violent crime.

On the other hand, in US itself, if you look at state-by-state statistics, murder (and other violent crime, and suicide) does not follow gun ownership at all. And the data about Australia shows the complete lack of any meaningful correlation between murders and gun ownership, and slight positive correlation between lack of guns and assaults/rapes (though I would be very reluctant to claim causation on these grounds). For that matter, similar figures are available for UK, where the murder rate was several times lower than US long before any wide-reaching gun bans went into effect, and actually rose over the years as gun control tightened (again, I'm not claiming causation here, just lack of correlation in the other direction).

Here's one interesting bit of data that I think is directly related, though. In US, 13% of all burglaries occur while the owner is at home. In UK, it's 45%.