> We keep going over the same ground, and you consistently have
> it backwards. The correlation between tighter gun laws and lower
> homicide rates has been supported in study after study ...
No, it's you who have it consistently backwards: the homicide rate in those countries isn't lower *because of* the laws; the homicide rate is lower *merely in addition* to the laws. In "study after study" the places that have the vast majority of violent gun crime in the US are the places in the US where the gun laws are the most strict. Think Washington DC; think New York City; think Chicago.
The violent crime rate in the US is not some smooth distribution curve.
I live in Oakland CA, a city with about 300k people, and we've had about 125 homicides so far this year. Neighboring Berkeley, with a little less than half the population, has just declared their *5th* homicide (and one of them happened in Berkeley because the Oakland gang member chased the other Oakland gang member into Berkeley before shooting him).
2/3 of the homicides in Oakland happen within *one square mile* ... Oakland has ~79 sq miles of area, nearly double San Francisco with less than half of the population.
Don't even bother reading the article, just look at the title of the URL from October:
This is not some statistical blip: the thing you are talking about is completely uncorrelated with any law you can think of. You might as well be saying that the cities with the best NFL football record have the highest "correlation" to violent gun crime, and if we could just shut down the NFL we'd have a violent crime rate that looks more in line with the rest of the capitalist world (i.e., Europe).
> The US homicide rate is not 15 times the combined total of 23 other
> developed capitalist countries because its minority gang members,
> disturbed white youth, and reactionary patriots are somehow, as you
> and Wojtek insist, more prone to uncontrollable violence than
> their equivalents in these other countries ...
I don't know where you got "prone" from, because this gang activity isn't something that just *happens* -- it's the direct result of economic policies that make participation in criminal activity *more attractive* ... this is what you call an "incentive" in the literature. In above-ground economies, you use the rule of law and your high-paid lawyer to rip off the other guy; in underground economies, violence, and the continued threat of it, is the replacement.
This is not something that is just happening: this is an entire ecosystem of criminal behavior.
Doug quotes the headlines of some papers:
> People carrying a gun 5x more likely to be shot than the unarmed:
> http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2008.143099
>
> Purchase of a gun doubles risk of death from suicide or homicide:
> http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.87.6.974
But even if Doug were to buy 100 guns and carry them around Brooklyn, thus increasing the liklihood 500x that he would be shot, he's *still not going to get shot* because he's not a participant in the underground economies that put you in a completely different cohort. This is just shoddy reportage, of pseudo-scientific "studies". Are there people who get shot mistakenly because of their physical proximity to this massive criminal activity which dwarfs all the other issues surrounding guns? Of course. Should there be a laws about that?
But my grandmother said that you won't get to the moon by first climbing a tree.
> the sole variable is that they have significantly more opportunity
> to acquire the weapons needed to commit violent acts on a large scale.
Rubbish. The violent crime rate in the US is undisturbed by mass-murder, which continues to be incredibly rare. The violent crime rate in the US is one crime at a time.
> Countries such as Britain and Australia which imposed restrictions
> on the sale of assault weapons after homicidal outbursts witnessed
> significant decreases in gun crime.
The US has similarly seen significant decreases in gun crime after Britain and Australia passed those laws. Read that again. The laws didn't cause the change in their homicide rate! Those laws took and incredibly small number in Britain and Australia and made it smaller. The base number is huge in the US, but the homicide rate in the US is *half* what it was a decade ago.
Was it ... gun control that did this?
> You've held up Canada as an as an example of a country where a
> relatively
> low homicide rate coexists with widespread gun ownership. But the
> procedures
> for obtaining and carrying a gun are stricter here than in the US.
Yes, and also there's a widespread lack of NASCAR tracks in that country. Wow, it's a correlation! Quick! Get a paper written, that can be then suppressed by the NRA!
The people who live in Canada a few miles from Detroit ARE NOT INVOLVED IN DETROIT'S CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES. Canada does not have a Detroit, or even an Oakland for that matter.
> Lanza's mother, for example, might still have been able to obtain
> the Buckmaster AR-15 in Canada after more intensive screening, but
> her son would not have been able to fire hundreds of uninterrupted
> rounds as in Newtown since the gun can only be sold here with a five
> shot magazine which requires frequent reloading.
Rubbish. You can, with very little practice, kill as many unarmed children as you want to, with any gun you want. There's nothing about the AR-15 that makes it any more likely that Adam Lanza would have accomplished his goal. The multiplier in his case was whether he went to a second classroom for more victims, not whether he didn't have to reload. He fired, if the reports can be believed, "hundreds of rounds" -- many into bodies that were long-since dead. I've said before that efficiency doesn't appear to have been on his mind thatmorning. If he would have gone to a third room -- which he apparently clearly could have -- the number would be different, but the tragedy would be the same: a troubled man went to a school and killed some children and adults.
Does it matter if it was 20 or 50? Does it matter if it was 10 or 5?
Would you feel a sense of accomplishment if, as a result of magically disappearing all Bushmasters in the world with a single pen stroke, that you were able to save "50%" of the children, because 20 was too hard what with reloading and all and 10 was all he could muster?
You're barking up the wrong tree.
/jordan