Summations Only

Bang on, CS. Well said.

Then I would suggest that you look further, because this is a chart of gun homicides per 100,000 people - not all homicides per 100,000 people.If gun control simply shifts the weapons used in murders from guns to knives or clubs, it's hard to see how that's any better. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything but homemade Excel charts from unspecified data, and at any rate it was all US-specific. But I don't see that your contention that "when people have guns, they kill more than when they don't" can be supported by this data. They may very well kill more with guns when guns are available than when they're not, but that seems like a tautology. The question is whether the availability of guns causes people to commit more murders, and at least in the US - where the Brady Score (an index of a state's level of gun control) has no statistical association with the overall homicide rate whatsoever - that doesn't seem to be the case. Proponents of that idea would have to demonstrate both a statistical relationship and a putative mechanism by which guns make people murderous.

I know the popular history has Gandhi as this great peaceful leader, and this is somewhat off-topic, but describing the fight for Indian independence as "non-violent" as a result makes about as much sense as calling the American Revolution "non-violent" because all Thomas Paine did was write pamphlets.Hundreds of people died during the fight for Indian independence as a result of bombings of British government targets, a campaign of assassinations, and foreign arms importation. All of which made the continued occupation of India an increasingly unpopular idea. The notion that India won its independence because of a few quips from a thin gay guy in a robe is popular, but elides the truth - freeing your country is a struggle, and there's no way to just talk your way through it. Popular force of arms is inevitably a part of it.

They killed hundreds with a campaign of explosives terrorism. How is that "non-violent"?

This, again, looks like firearm homicides (they keep saying "particularly firearm homicides".) And there's no putative mechanism by which availability of guns makes people want to kill each other.Isn't it just as reasonable to suggest that when people live somewhere with a lot of homicides, they get firearms for personal protection? And then when they decide to murder someone in turn, they use their firearms to do it?I can't really consider this evidence, I guess, since I can't review any of the referenced literature.

Earlier in the thread, a similar decline years after the introduction of strict gun control in the UK was used as evidence that it had a positive, if belated, effect.Can I therefore now use the decline in US murders as evidence that our gun ownership regime has worked?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Are you sure you're not doing what creationists do and simply suspending your skepticism because you trust the source? If you can't review the evidence, how can you trust Harvard's conclusions about it? What if they simply cherry-picked the studies that support their conclusions? At least a couple of those papers don't even appear in a literature search. And all of this flies in the face of the evidence I'm able to access:orIgnoring the putative "trend line" they drew there, can you see correlation? I don't. This data is from the 1980 International Crime Survey. Or:All over the map - no apparent trend in gun ownership vs homicide rate. Or:Again, ignore the calculated "trend line" and it becomes obvious, we're looking at a plot of two completely unrelated variables. This is FBI crime data plotted against a Washington Post survey of gun ownership. Probably not the strongest model for gun ownership but your Harvard review doesn't even specify their proxy. They just claim they used a good one.So I guess I need better evidence to connect gun ownership to the murder rate than "Harvard thinks so."

Why? It seems perfectly obvious to me. Nobody looks at a gun and says "oh, you know, I should go murder someone today." If you're going to commit a murder, then you reach for whatever is handy and effective. If that's a gun, you go with the gun. But if there's not a gun there you don't say "oops, forgot I was in a gun control state, no murders for me!" You just reach for the kitchen knife or the tire iron, instead.What's the mechanism by which the availability of guns would affect the overall murder rate? I'm not seeing it. [qs=crash]Are you sure you're not doing what creationists do and simply suspending your skepticism because you trust the source? So you are, actually, suspending your skepticism because you trust the source. I'm always surprised when people flat-out contradict themselves in the space of a single post.

And so on what? I don't see how any of that would affect the overall murder rate. It might affect the overall murder success rate, as well as the accidental death from gunshot injuries rate, but merely the fact that a weapon has the ability to kill at range doesn't make anybody want to kill someone at range.Or if it does, I don't understand why that would be the case. Like I said there needs to be a proposed mechanism, here. You're the one who raised charges of "acting like a creationist", not me. One of the things that creationists do is unreasonably accept, without question, claims made by individuals they trust. I have ample reason to doubt their work - their conclusions are supported only by inaccessible evidence and they contradict the evidence I'm able to access. That should prompt skepticism in a reasonable person, but you've decided to suspend skepticism simply on the basis of the "Harvard" brand name, precisely what you previously asserted you were not doing.

You must have misunderstood: "Ample" means "much", not "none."And again, you keep presenting studies that conflate "homicide" with "gun homicide." As I stated it makes perfect sense that the availability of guns will increase the use of guns in homicides, because guns are clearly better tools for killing people.But, for the third time, there's no reason at all why we should expect that the availability of guns will make more people want to kill. That's the mechanism that I don't understand. It makes zero sense, so I need something more than "some important organizations believe it." What's the mechanism by which proximity to a gun causes depression or makes you want to kill yourself? Not especially probative to the issue; "major cause" and "incidence varies greatly city to city" are weasel words that connote no significant knowledge. Not sure what you think this cite supports, could you explain? This is true for kitchen knives, golf clubs, and household bleach as well - or indeed, any household item. The need to use anything to defend yourself in your home is, thankfully, quite rare. But that's not what you're being asked to defend. There's no dispute that people use guns to kill each other. None at all. The question is whether guns make people want to kill each other, or themselves. I don't see any reason why that could be the case, and you've not provided any evidence for that view. I'm sorry but you're wrong; I've never been asked to defend the position that a mass shooting couldn't occur without access to guns, and since I've never held that position there would be no reason why I should defend it. But if you don't believe that it's possible to commit mass murder without access to firearms, then I can quite easily point to an instance in the US where more than 3000 people were killed by people armed with nothing more dangerous than razor blades. It happened a couple of years back and, to my knowledge, made the news even over there in the UK.

Sure, but who, once they've decided to kill - or lost their mind in the heat of the moment - decides not to do so because it would be too much effort?

Well, yes. I was on board with that a dozen posts ago.But merely shifting murder modalities from firearms to knives or clubs doesn't seem like an improvement. In what sense was the mass killing Colorado "caused by guns"? Guns didn't make James Holmes storm a theater and start shooting. No mechanism by which guns cause murders has been put forward, even though I've asked several times. James Holmes caused James Holmes to do that, and we may yet go back further and discover that, somehow, James Holmes was exposed to something in the course of his research that turned him into a killer. Why would I agree with that? In the Philippines in 1956, Domingo Salazar was able to murder 15 people - more than in Aurora - with nothing more than a spear and a bolo knife. Is it my position that the proximity of a firearm doesn't magically mind-control people into suicides or murders that they wouldn't otherwise try to commit? Yes, that's my position. It's insufficient for you to defend the opposite view with nothing more than "I find it impossibly unlikely." I find it very likely, in fact, that guns don't have the power to control the minds of human beings.

Does it make any sense at all to trust your safety to the care of someone who has already endangered it by pointing a loaded weapon at you?

And if you have a handgun in a locked case, but the 10-inch chef's knife is just in a block in the kitchen, which are you more likely to go for?You're making an argument that on the margin, the presence of a gun enables some number of murders that wouldn't otherwise occur because it's easier to kill with a gun than with a knife. But it's a lot easier to get a knife than a gun. So, it seems to me that it's a wash. Almost everybody who is killed by a gun is killed in plain view of the killer, usually within eight feet.

A gun. But if I couldn't get a gun, I'd use a bomb. If I couldn't get a bomb I'd stab people one by one. Surely if I was driven to murder a bunch of people, and the fact that it's against the law to murder people didn't dissuade me, I doubt I'd be dissuaded by being denied my first choice of weapon. That doesn't seem to be the case with the Aurora shooting; he seems to have acquired his arsenal specifically for the purpose of mass murder.