Europe is apples. US is oranges. When they did compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges, they found absolutely no correlation between rates of gun ownership and homicide rates. But you can close your eyes, ears and hum loudly, you seem to be pretty good at it.
Alright, let’s not bullshit. Who lives where the gun violence is?
Okay, so we are still left with anyway you slice the data, the fact is murder by firearms are an order of magnitude (at least 4x) greater than a country that is a peer, and the non-firearm murder rate is slightly higher but about the same ballpark.
“A peer”. You’re still trying to pretend that comparing US to those countries is an apple to apple comparison. It is not. Now here is what happens when you try to force the comparison - I mean, look at the idea that you’re so hard trying to push here. You’re saying that in terms of “ordinary murderers” we’re the same as Europe - about the same number or such (proportional to the population) here as there.
But here we have an extra, special class of murderers - those who don’t want to murder by conventional means, but only by gun - and there are 3 times more of them than there are of “all murderers”. Now, since you think that US and Europe are comparable, that would mean that there is a big number of the same type of people - “gun-only murderers” there, but the lack of guns there prevents them from murdering, so they are just law-abiding citizens there.
Correct?
Developed first world countries that are somewhat comparable to the US have roughly the same non firearm murders as the US, and less than a quarter of the firearm murders.
No one has proven what that American exceptionalism is. But gun ownership, ability to legally purchase a gun from private sellers and availability levels in the US are factors that stands out like a sore thumb. But maybe it’s the water. 
My hypothesis is that it’s simply a lot easier to pull a trigger and it’s a lot easier to find a trigger to pull in the US of A. How do you explain the difference, Terr?
But you say there is the same number of “ordinary”, non-gun murderers. Wouldn’t it be easier for them in US to find a trigger as well? Why do they go out of their way to kill with something other than a gun?
As the study I pointed to shows, your hypothesis is disproven. The rate of gun ownership does not correlate to homicide rates when an attempt is made to control for other things - like relative wealth, economy, culture and ethnic make up of the population. As in taking similar neighboring countries and comparing them.
OK, that’s bullshit, to start with. The U.S. is nearer to being Europe, Jr., than is any other European colony-town in the world.
Yes. That is why Europeans are so baffled when they encounter US gun culture. Because we’re Europe, Jr.
Emphasis on “Jr.” Euros have outgrown that shit, and so should we.
Ridiculous, un-statistical notions driven by the hysterical media coverage of school shootings aside, the immense bulk of the murder numbers still come from the same old sources: abusive husbands kill their wives, men kill other men who they believe are cheating with their wives/girlfriends, drug dealers kill other drug dealers, occasionally one of the same type of people who would kill his wife’s lover gets offended at some lesser nonsense like his car getting scratched and kills the guy who did it. These are things done by people from the low-education, low-income segments of “honor cultures.” Southern rednecks and people who live in ethnic ghettos. People from these cultures don’t become political elites, and the well-funded middle-class white people who have always been the leaders of the gun confiscation movement don’t live in the hood.
Sounds plausible to me. AFAIK, I’ve little intimate knowledge of actual murderers but it certainly seems to me that guns make some murders relatively “easy.”
Some pro-gun Dopers have claimed that most mass killers who used guns would have killed anyway, perhaps with knives. This claim strikes me as absurd.
Southern rednecks don’t contribute much to gun violence because they live in low-density rural areas. Most gun violence takes place in cities. Cities vote for Democrats and are pro-gun control. This includes both white people and minorities. So the assertion that those who support gun control aren’t familiar with guns or gun violence is false. Maybe if it was amended to “middle class white people who live in surburban areas.” Or SWPLers.
Or maybe the simple answer works as well. “Ordinary” murders use ordinary weapons; and the US exceptionalists turn to firearms.
Terr, did you even read your 50 page study that’s about a decade out of date?
The authors are interpreting, projecting and making some pretty tenuous leaps to “control” for other factors. And they neglected to put the US in the tables for the European countries so it would be easy to make comparisons. Since they are trying to use evidence in Europe to make conclusions about the US, that’s quite the oversight. Far from having proven or even given anything like credible data to show that the murder rate in the US would be just as high if magically there were no firearms available. Nor shown any credible data that if “legal” guns all disappeared, that the homicide rate would remain unchanged (and lets include accidental firearms deaths as well). Nor shown any data that if there was universal firearm registration, background purchase checks and funding to enforce the laws on the books that the firearm death rate would be unchanged.
Here’s 2000 data from the UN courtesy of wiki: Gun violence - Wikipedia One click and you can compare all the countries with the right to bear arms, or look at firearm murders, or non firearm murders. I can’t find any reasonably comparable country in there that is anywhere near the US levels for firearm murders. Feel free to click through and see if you can come up with some kind of smoking gun. Thanks for playing.
Southern cities are full of low-impulse-control white people (“rednecks” for lack of a better shorthand), who I’m fairly sure commit the vast majority of non-gang-related murders.
Ah I see. So you’re the advocate of the absurd theory that every year, 9000 or so people in the US become murderers because they have access to guns. And if they didn’t have that access, they would have continued to be placid and nice law abiding citizens and would not murder anyone.
I can’t really argue against absurdities except pointing out that they are. But if you really believe that, that’s your problem.
I like my guns but to be fair, guns are more lethal for the same reason they have such a higher “success rate” for suicide attempts. Someone who was going to just stab someone and run away might now shoot that person and the odds of dying from a stab wound is a lot lower than a gun wound.
If you were ea life insurance company, would you rather than criminals running around with knives or guns?
The problem is that those criminals aren’t very likely to give up their guns just because you pass a law.
You’re missing his (absurd) point. Those “knife” murderers are already accounted for - since non-gun-homicide rates are about the same in US and in other countries. What he’s arguing for is that US has this completely separate class of murderers - those that murder by gun, and, if there were no guns, would be good law-abiding citizens.
You’re making the conclusion about the “good law-abiding citizens”, which is a logical fallacy.
Ceteris paribus, I’ll fully grant you in a US without firearms, that there would be more criminals using knives and other weapons. There would probably be more murders with non-firearms than there are today. Those that are deliberately criminal would find other weapons - but said weapons are up close and personal and not as deadly as firearms (generally speaking but feel free to pick all the nits you want).
Terr, are you trying to make the argument that the murder rate in the US would be the exact same with or without firearms? That when using a weapon with intent to harm/kill, that firearms are not the “best” most “efficient” weapon (versus knife, baseball bat, trained attack hamsters, etc.). That using a knife, and usually more than one stab with blood spraying all over, is easier than blasting someone at 10 paces? That there are no murders taking place in the heat of the moment when someone grabs the gun in the bedroom and blasts away, or a perp ambushes someone on the street when they wouldn’t have the balls to use a knife, or any other easily imagined scenario?
Why? If guns were banned in the US, why would its homicide rate be much more than other countries? What reason would you propose for such a discrepancy? Is there something special about the US compared to others that would cause this?
Sure, a lot of those handgun murders would become knife murders but a lot of them would become knife assaults. Knives just aren’t as lethal as guns. The answer is universal license and registration.
Yeah, our country was incubated in genocide and born in violent revolution. Our place in the world is largely the result of killing and dying better than others. one day in a million years under a world governemnt, we might evolved out of this sort of behaviour but I hope we don’t run into any Klingons after we get rid of our aggression.