But not all nations. And not when we replace "gun deaths" with "homicides".
No, but the nations most like the US.
Only when you ignore geography. Exactly how many of those nations "most like the US" share a long and porous border with a nation with a 22/100k homicide rate? None you say? Those nations are not exactly like the US then.
And since you wet yourself screaming about how DARE we compare ANY nation to the United States, this should make you happy that we're narrowing it to nations closest to the US in economic development and government.
And every single time you trot this out, I point out that geography has a massive effect on homicide rates within a country. I'll once again point out the lists of countries by homicide rate
and guns per-capita
. There is close to zero correlation between the two. What is quite obvious? Homicide rates tend to group together by geographical proximity. Obviously, factors like ease of movement between nations modify this, but as a general rule, if your country borders another country with a high homicide rate, you'll have a higher homicide rate than another neighbor which doesn't.
But hey! Ignore data in favor of rhetoric if you want.
Except that then you get data that doesn't support the conclusions you wanted so... "Wait! We need ALL nations!"
Which is strange given that you're the one cherry picking data. You're intentionally restricting your data set to just those that support your point, while ignoring all the other data out there that doesn't. So in your world, there's some magical thing that happens in just advanced/developed nations which makes their citizens kill each other based on whether they have access to guns, but in the entire rest of the world, there's not only no correlation at all, but most have a reverse correlation (lower gun ownership often results in high homicide rates).
That's a strange assumption to make, let alone use to justify such a cherry picking of the data. It makes far more sense to assume that developed European nations have lower homicide rates because they are relatively distant (and isolated) from nations with high homicide rates and it's sheer coincidence that they almost all happen to have adopted relatively strict gun control laws. There's no evidence to tell us what would happen if tomorrow every European nation adopted less stringent gun control like in the US. Do you honestly think they'd all just lose their minds and go on killing sprees because they could more easily buy guns? That's pretty silly.
Similarly, there is more or less zero reason to think that making gun laws more strict in the US would have any positive effect on violent crime or homicide. I mean, there's lots of arguments by people who assume it would, but not actual solid evidence to support those arguments. People don't kill because they have a gun. They kill (or commit other crimes) for a host of different reasons. Having a gun may make some crimes easier to commit, or may be a weapon of choice, but the idea that someone is going to choose to kill or not kill based on access to a gun is also incredibly silly. Why would you think that? Yet, that's essentially what your argument rests on.
And I already did a raw homicide comparison in the other thread. The US didn't come out too well in that one either.
And you also ignored the geographical factors, despite me pointing it out to you repeatedly. I'm not sure how many times I can do the equivalent of pointing to the answer right there in the book before it'll sink in here Joph. I also pointed out that when you index gun ownership rates and homicide rates, the US actually comes out quite well compared to many European nations. Certainly, it's not off the charts in any real way. Folks in the UK actually commit homicides at a higher rate relative to the rate of guns they have access to than folks in the US (I think that's the nation I used in my comparison, don't feel like re-doing the math right atm). Point being that this is strong evidence that there's no correlation at all between gun ownership rates and homicide rates. If there was (as I pointed out about the graph you linked earlier), we'd see all the nations fall more or less in a line. We don't. They're all along widely divergent slopes, indicating no correlation.
But I guess data analysis is not your strong suite. Edited, Mar 7th 2013 7:26pm by gbaji