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There is a strong correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates. Actually, everybody in the rest of the world knows that, it's only in the US that some lobby wants to spin this fairly obvious fact into another direction.

Owning a gun does not increase violence or cause homicides, of course. Owning a gun simply makes it much easier for a violent person to kill.

Now whether gun control in the US could have a desired effect, that's another question. Given that the US is swamped in legal and illegal firearms, I guess the answer could be No. But don't fool yourself in thinking that there is no link between gun ownership and violent homicides.

Handle a gun safely. You mean ensure it's clean and loaded, aim it at the person you'd like to kill and pull the trigger? I think the numbers demonstrate Americans can handle guns just fine. The numbers also demonstrate less Swiss would get killed by guns if there were fewer of them. You are mistaken if you think the Swiss are significantly better off than Americans in that regard.

The graph here shows that gun deaths scale quite neatly with ownership rates.

I will simply paste the first link that came up when I googled gun death:

http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm

You are more than welcome to rationalize this away. I will be waiting and interested in how you do it.

Conversely, if nobody has weapons on a "legal basis", only criminals and oppressive government agents have guns. This was tried in Asia several millenia ago

Guns are several millennia?

The "if guns were outlawed, only criminals would have guns" argument is a self-fulfilling argument, because having a gun would then define you as a criminal. It works well as a slogan, but it's worthless as an argument.

It also fails to take into account the flip side: Almost all gun crimes here in the US are done with guns that were originally bought legally. Take away the legal guns, and the "criminals" (whoever that is) would have a very hard time getting guns, and less of a need to carry arms too.
Furthermore, about half of all crimes involving firearms were not done by "criminals", but by up-to-then upstanding citizens with no previous records. While most "criminals" did not use firearms.

If you still think that everyone is safer with public access to guns, please take a look at this picture. I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Yes, I'd feel much safer if "only criminals had guns", like in many other countries.

I've got accidental gun deaths at 10% of homicides, not 1% ? And suicide above homicides, by widely varying margins (+50 to 1000%)

Do suicides and ganbangers not count as gun deaths ? or do you consider them lesser deaths ? or do you have another point ? BTW, gun suicides are more effective, and do raise the death count of suicide attempts.

Source: http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm

and how many extra gun deaths do you think letting 12 yo have guns would cause ?

hint: http://www.gun-control-network.org/International.gif

(and that chart is only for INTENTIONAL deaths, you can add accidents to that, not that there are ver any accidents with guns...)

Safe? In the UK?

According to the UK media which we can read online over here, everyone carries knives - except the law abiding, who huddle and cower; and the police, who arrest the law abiding for anti-social behaviour if they dare resist their knife carrying, stabby chav overlords.

Of course my perception of your living conditions across the pond might be a tad colored by the fact I live in a state where if some bastard wielding a knife or other weapon threatens me I can blow him to hell and gone in a heartbeat with very little concern about ending up on the wrong side of the law.

"The first Operation Blunt was launched across 12 London boroughs in 2004. It was expanded in 2008 after a spate of murders involving young men and knives. Between 2007 and 2008, 277 stabbing deaths were recorded across England and Wales.

There were almost 20,000 homicides in the US.

"Offences for the current financial year are at their lowest level for a decade, with 31 fewer homicides than at the same time in the previous year. Knife crime is down 1.2 per cent on 2008 levels and 13.5 per cent on 2007."

  as for relative gun crime vs gun ownership, see http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm.

I know where I'd feel safer.

I would like to see were you get your statistics since I have never seen any that corroborate your hypothesis.
In fact all statistics I have seen point in the opposite direction.
Here is one of many http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm

May I suggest getting off your soup (sic) box and using some soup (sic) to clean your ears?

No thanks ... I prefer soap for cleaning, and soup for eating. Maybe I'm funny that way, but I don't think so ...

The number of gun deaths are extremely low at around 30,000/year with roughly half of them are self inflected

And Canada's gun-related death rate is MUCH lower, even taking into account the smaller population. http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm

With 1/9 the population, our firearm death toll should be 30,000/9, or 3,333 - it's 1,300 (of which 1,000 are suicides), so the homicide rate (15,000 in the US, 300 in Canada ) adjusted for population is more than 5 times higher, and the suicide rate 60% higher, in the US.

If you think government healthcare is the way to go look to England and Canada for inspiration. Their numbers may be better but both systems are having major problems.

Actually, all those phony ads that have been run about that woman who "had to go to the US to get operated on for a brain tumor" turned out to be full of shit. She never had a brain tumor, and the cyst was stable and didn't need to be operated on. She wasted $100,000 for nothing. She even admitted afterwards that the Canadian system had monitored it correctly for years, and that it wasn't in fact a tumor. But of course, when there's $100,000 to be made, the doctor says "you should have this removed." So much for for-profit health care.

No system is perfect, but Canada's is the envy of the Brits (in Canada you choose your doctor). It's also the envy of Americans who have no health insurance.

any one can go into an emergency room and get treated for an emergency.

And what about chronic conditions? Oh, just wait until it turns into a health emergency, and if you make it to the hospital ER, great! Sort of mitigates against preventative care, which helps explain the higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates in Canada vs. the (dis)United States, where those that have, get care, and those that don't, don't.

"Here's the story about the mall shooting Feb 13 2007. If that off-duty officer (or someone else that was legally carrying a handgun) wasn't there, how many more people would have been killed? http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/13/national/main2466711.shtml [cbsnews.com]"

See my other post, that's a few lives saved, but way more people get killed because of the wide availability of guns in the US than get saved once in a while in these shootings. An some of these shooting would not even happen whitout this easy access to fire arm.

Saying that guns save lives is the slippery slope fallacy, more gun = more deaths.

  "Homicide rates tend to be related to firearm ownership levels. Everything else being equal, a reduction in the percentage of households owning firearms should occasion a drop in the homicide rate".

Evidence to the Cullen Inquiry 1996: Thomas Gabor, Professor of Criminology - University of Ottawa

http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm

indeed, the US has a rate of unintentional gun-deaths per year per 100K citizens (children playing, gun accidentaly goin off ,...) that approaches the TOTAL number of gun deaths (murders included, not just accidents) per year per 100K citizens ... those are HARD facts.
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm

So far as I'm concerned, every time a law-abiding citizen is killed because he was unable to legally acquire a firearm with which to defend himself, the people who prevented him are partly responsible for his death.

You could equally well say that those who allow guns to proliferate in a society in the first place are responsible for enabling the criminals to facilitate their crimes. After all, if buying a gun had to be done on the black market, and so they cost $75,000 each, few criminals would consider them worth the cost.

But all this is academic. If you want to live in the real world, look at the correlation between gun proliferation and gun deaths. Doesn't take a genius to understand that the more guns are around, the more people are going to get shot. The USA is living proof of that.

these statistics

"Increased gun laws or bans tends to result in an increase in organized crime."

But Britain has much, much less gun-related crime than the USA. Look at this for instance.

These stats are a bit dated, but still suggestive:

Gun deaths per 100,000 population

US Homicide 4.08 Suicide 6.08 Accidental 0.42 [1999]
UK Homicide 0.12 Suicide 0.25 Accidental 0.01 {1999] [*slightly simplified] Some Facts About Guns

There were 765 homicides in England and Wales in 2005/2006. The numbers are small enough that the work of a single serial killer or a lone terrorist incident can be visible on the charts. 'Homicide' - Long-term national recorded crime trend

Sample page (first one I pulled up from Google):

http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF05.htm

Total homicides using all types of guns in 2004/05 - 78. That's 78 deaths in a whole year in the entire COUNTRY. How many gun related deaths in the US during the same period? Remembering there are only 4 times the number of people so your target to aim for is 78 x 4 = 312 deaths. You'll not be surprised when I tell you that the US has around 30,000 gun-related homicides - that's about 100 times more per head of population.

If there are some figures to support your claim that more guns equals less crime, I'd be more than willing to take a look.

Donating to the FSF that way sounds like a great idea, but here's some flamebait... Do you think your family will be all that happy about giving money to the NRA if you are unlawfully killed by a gunman who just happens to be a member?

FWIW, I live in Scotland - gun crime has been falling consistently here since the Dublane massacre (13 March 96) in which 16 kids and their teacher were killed by a gunman who walked into their school (sound familiar?). In 1999, the homicide rate here was 0.12 per 100,000. That's about five people in a population of five million. By contrast, the US rate was 4.08 in 100,000 - that's (assuming a population of about 250,000,000) 10,000 homicides, or thereabouts. That, btw doesn't include suicides with guns, where the rate was about 50% higher. The numbers to back all this up are here. I'm not a member of this lot, but the facts speak for themselves, IMNSHO.

I'd rather live in a country where I have a one-in-a-million chance of being shot dead than one where I have a one in 25,000 chance.

I know it's not in the FSF's remit, but perhaps Professor Moglen would like to comment?

Well, lets see, I got this from the Gun Control Network

There were 4,019 crimes involving handguns. While this number has increased in the last two years, the figure is still lower than those recorded in 1992 and 1993.

So while it is true that crime did not disappear, it certainly was not as bad as it used to be when guns were legal.

Now for the most important thing for us to know is Murders in 1996, 679. Murders in 2001/02 was 886. So yes there was an increase, but if you look at the total number of crimes committed, in 1996, it was 239,340, in 2001/2002 it was 650,154. So for a drastic increase in the amount of crimes committed there were not a drastic increase in the number of murders! This statistics provided by Research Development Statistics of the UK.

It seems to me that gun control was done those people a world of good. Of course I am not suprised by your answer. People tend to form an opinion and will attempt to find the facts to fit there preference.

It is reminiesent of when we had all these doom-sayers preaching that if the US raised the speed limit to 65 that people would be dying left and right, it would be holocaust of people flying all over the road... Funny, how the world somehow did not end.

1. Guns were used in only 4.7% of robberies in 1999 and 4.4% in 1998
2. Handgun homicide figures are very low and since 1980 have fluctuated from a low of 7 in 1988, through to 35 in 1993 and a previous high of 39 in1997. So 42 gun murders in 1999 does not represent a statistically significant increase.
3. There is evidence of a growth in the use of imitation guns in crime but no figures can be put on this. It is likely however that some of the rise in handgun crime is attributable to imitations.

Source gun control network

I was AMAZED when I read this. Especially taking into account that population in the UK = pop of US/4 or so.

Now I feel I have to put in context one of your statements:

"My point is, if you can't stop criminals and psychopaths getting hold of weapons, you might as well at least allow ordinary people" to.

Ok, so you're suggesting a system just like the united states right? Let's see in the U.S.: In 1999, 58% of all gun deaths were suicides, and 38% were homicides.(SOURCE: Hoyert DL, Arias E, Smith BL, Murphy SL, Kochanek, KD. Deaths: Final Data for 1999. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2001;49 (8).)

It looks like guns are bad in the hands of ordinary people as well as criminals to me. *me wonders how many of those homicides were by ordinary people in a fit of rage, or by ordinary people accidentally shooting their friends/family etc. I wish I had those figures.

> Sorry to ruin your fun, but gun crime has gone
> up dramatically since guns were illegalised a
> few years ago.

Well, first I would say that 33 years was more than a "few years". Secondly, I would point you towards here for your ill-informed statement on gun crime going "up dramatically".

> So you want to cut down on them? I take it
> then you're not a frail old woman sitting in
> her house at 3am when a 8-foot 20st rapist
> breaks in.

A very plausible example - an 8 foot rapist after a frail woman, who fends off said criminal with a blast from her trusty uzi and army surplus machine gun. Even in such a case, surely a handgun would be much easier and less extreme than a uzi? When would you want to use a uzi for defense, short of stopping an invading army?