A History of Violence, the Economist
A History of Violence, the Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21700596-evidence-growing-gun-violence-america-product-weak-gun-laws-guns
"SNIP..........
Pro-gun groups point out that rates of gun ownership tend to be highest in rural, sparsely populated states, where crime rates are low. By the same token, over the past two decades, as the number of guns in America has risen sharply, crime rates have fallen. Yet even as the number of guns in America has grown, the share of households with a gun has dropped steadily. Research published in 2000 by Mark Duggan of the University of Chicago concluded that the homicide rate had been falling in tandem with the proportion of households where guns were kept. What’s more, the homicide rate was falling with a lag, suggesting that reduced gun ownership was causing the decline, and was not simply a side-effect of a falling crime rate.
Other studies have reached similar conclusions. An analysis published in 2014, for example, using detailed county-level data assembled by the National Research Council, a government-funded body, suggested that laws that allow people to carry weapons are associated with a substantial rise in the incidence of assaults with a firearm. It also found evidence that such laws might also lead to increases in other crimes, like rape and robbery. A recent survey of 130 studies concluded that strict gun-control laws do indeed reduce deaths caused by firearms.
Links between gun ownership and violence are less well established than they might be, in part because lobbyists for gun rights have pushed to reduce public funding for research on the issue. In 2013 the Journal of American Medicine published an article on this phenomenon, describing how in 1996, for instance, Congress ordered the Centres for Disease Control to spend less money contemplating how to reduce shootings.
The main difficulty for academics studying the link between guns and gun crime, however, is the lack of a true counterfactual. A researcher cannot hold all other things constant while varying the stringency of gun laws in order to isolate the effect of those laws on the incidence of violence. That leaves open the possibility that any reductions in crime following a tightening of gun laws may be rooted in other, unrelated causes. Crime rates have tumbled in many rich countries in recent decades, complicating any analysis of the role of guns.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
The yahoos into gunz aren't going to accept any study, any more than they are going to admit this is just wrong:
