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>>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<<

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More guns, less crime? Not according to the data.
By National Observer in News, US News, Politics | February 16th 2018

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” 
said Wayne LaPierre, vice president of the National Rifle Association 
(NRA), after a gunman killed 20 children and six others at Sandy Hook 
Elementary School in December 2012.

Not long after the deadly school shooting that recently killed 17 in 
Parkland, Florida, gun rights advocates argued that the shooter may have 
been deterred if there were more guns available, in the hands of teachers 
and staff. But there's little evidence to support this.

An American is forty times more likely to encounter a gun than most other 
human beings in the world.
On the contrary, the data shows that the U.S. stands alone among developed 
countries when it comes to firearm-related murders. Guns were used to 
murder more than two-thirds of all victims in the U.S. In comparison, 
Mexico, one of the most violent countries in the world, had fewer than 
half of its murder victims die by firearm violence. (In 2011, 34 per cent 
of Canadian murder victims, 20 per cent of Australian victims, and two per 
cent of Japanese victims died from a gun).

It’s not that Americans are more violent than people in other countries: 
in 2011, both Brits and Australians were statistically more likely to be 
injured in a violent crime. But the American is forty times more likely to 
encounter a gun. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and 
Crime, gun victims are six times more likely die than victims of assault 
with a knife or blunt object.


But America has many, many more guns in circulation than any other 
country. In 2011, 270 million firearms were circulated in the U.S., almost 
90 guns for every 100 people. No other country comes close: Yemen, in the 
midst of of civil war, only has 55 guns for every 100 people.

Even so, the data show that Americans are not more prone to violence than 
Canadians or Australians. In spite of this, compared to the average 
American, Canadians are ten times less likely to be victims of gun 
violence. (Brits are fourteen times and Australians forty times less 
likely.) The U.S. is also one of the few developed countries in the world 
without a comprehensive firearms registry.

The aggregate data almost certainly understates the global impact of 
American guns. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the 
vast majority of guns seized and traced in Mexico are of American origin. 
About a quarter of these weapons are high-caliber weapons, such as AK and 
AR-15 type semiautomatic rifles.

In Canada, traced guns have almost always been American. But the steady 
flood of American guns may have slowed: the National Weapons Enforcement 
Support Team (NWEST) estimates that, in the last three years, 60 per cent 
of B.C. crime guns have come from domestic sources. The Task Force on 
Illegal Firearms attributes this curious trend to “changes in firearms 
legislation in states such as Washington and Oregon requiring 
recordkeeping at the point of sale for all firearms… In Canada, there is 
no national legislation to require record keeping for sales.”

B.C.’s experience suggests that when U.S. gun laws are strengthened, 
criminals will find firearms from different places. But when Americans 
loosen their gun laws, the global market is flooded with cheap weapons. 
Political scientists estimate that the U.S. assault weapons ban expiring 
in 2004 directly caused an additional 158 gun deaths per year in Mexican 
border municipos. The massive U.S. gun stockpile essentially gives the 
Americans a global monopoly on firearms and small arms violence.

Americans more or less agree: the U.S. needs more gun control. For the 
last two decades, a consistent majority of Americans have supported 
stricter gun control; those who want less regulation have increased in 
number, but number no more than one in five respondents.

So why has the U.S. failed to strengthen their gun laws in spite of 
sustained public opinion? The seminal argument, John Lott’s More Guns, 
Less Crime, was published in 1998 and has blurred the parameters of the 
gun safety debate ever since. “States that ban the concealed carrying of 
guns have murder rates 127 per cent higher than states with the most 
liberal concealed-carry laws,” Lott reports. “States with [no gun control] 
have less crime.” A peaceful society, the thinking goes, is most likely 
when everybody is armed and able to defend themselves with lethal force.

This is a willful misreading of statistics. The data simply do not support 
the “more guns, less crime” claim. States with stricter regulations may 
have higher murder rates, but the laws were instituted in response to 
crime, not the other way around. Easy domestic firearm transport and trade 
of firearms further obfuscates their argument. Republicans often talk 
about Chicago, which has one of the highest murder rates and strictest gun 
laws in the U.S. What they don’t say is that 60 per cent of all firearms 
seized in Chicago come from outside state lines. (Neighboring Wisconsin 
and Indiana both have some of the weakest gun laws in the U.S.)

But the data do definitively show that countries with fewer guns in 
circulation have fewer homicides and lower levels of crime lethality. 
(This relationship holds for the 50 U.S. states, too.) Brits, Australians, 
and Americans all have similar rates of violent crime, but Americans are 
much more likely to use a firearm. The presence of a gun turns assault 
into mass murder-- and there are as many guns as people in the United 
States.

The more likely culprit is the gun lobby, which has spent extensively on 
U.S. campaigns. In the 2016 election, the NRA spent a combined $31.2 
million dollars supporting Donald Trump and opposing Hillary Clinton.

The effort paid off. A year ago, in one of his first official acts as 
President, Donald Trump signed a bill overturning regulations that 
required background checks for more people with a history of mental 
illness.

On February 14, seventeen people were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman 
High School in Parkland, Florida. It was the 18th school shooting of 2018. 
in a televised statement from the White House, the President offered 
condolences to the victims of the latest American mass shooting.

“We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure 
our schools, and tackle the difficult issue of mental health,” Trump said.

He did not mention guns.


https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/02/16/news/more-guns-less-crime-not-
according-data

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>>>>>>   More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Mike Flannigan <mflannigan@jam.rr.com> - 2018-04-19 01:37 +0000
  Re: >>>>>>   More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Steve BH <sbharris@gmail.com> - 2018-04-19 18:22 -0700
  Re: >>>>>>   More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Steve BH <sbharris@gmail.com> - 2018-04-19 19:27 -0700
  Re: >>>>>>   More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Steve BH <sbharris@gmail.com> - 2018-04-19 19:29 -0700
  Re: >>>>>>   More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Lofty Goat <rlwatkins@gmail.com> - 2018-04-19 22:14 -0500
    Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< benj <benj@nobody.net> - 2018-04-20 17:58 -0400
      Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Sergio <invalid@invalid.com> - 2018-04-20 18:53 -0500
        Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< benj <benj@nobody.net> - 2018-04-20 21:32 -0400
          Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Sergio <invalid@invalid.com> - 2018-04-20 21:30 -0500
            Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< benj <benj@nobody.net> - 2018-04-21 12:53 -0400
              Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Sergio <invalid@invalid.com> - 2018-04-21 12:31 -0500
        Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Lofty Goat <rlwatkins@gmail.com> - 2018-04-21 19:38 -0500
          Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< benj <benj@nobody.net> - 2018-04-22 13:22 -0400
          Re: >>>>>> More Guns, Less Crime? Not According To The Data Comparing Gun Infested USA To Civilized Nations <<<<< Sergio <invalid@invalid.com> - 2018-04-22 15:02 -0500

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