Okay, but the majority of violence is gun violence, so we’ll start there. We can look into reducing other forms of violence as well, through mental health initiatives, poverty reduction, ending the war on drugs, stuff like that. We don’t really have to do just one thing at a time, really.
But gun violence is the big one, and it is one that we could do something about, if we were willing to cooperate about it.
Then don’t listen to the “gun grabbers”, I don’t.
And it’s no excuse when it is exactly what is happening. It does no good for one state to have strict gun control, when the state next door makes a mint selling guns into it.
No but it makes violent crime less lethal (bolding below mine):
Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries , according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.
This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html
And…
Consistent with prior research, this study demonstrates that Connecticut’s handgun purchaser licensing law is associated with a subsequent reduction in homicide rates. As would be expected if the reduction is driven by the law, the policy’s effects are only evident for homicides committed with firearms.
SOURCE: Association between Connecticut’s permit-to-purchase handgun law and homicides (PDF)
And…
Controlling only for baseline differences across states and year effects nationally (model 1, Table 2), the repeal of Missouri’s PTP handgun licensing law was associated with an increase in firearm homicide rates of 1.32 per 100,000
(p<.001), a 29.4 percent increase above rates projected without the repeal. After controlling for changes in rates of unemployment, poverty, burglary, incarceration, and law enforcement officers along with other state laws, the estimated increase in annual firearm homicide rates associated with the repeal of Missouri’s PTP handgun law dropped to 1.09 per 100,000 population per year (p<.001; 95% CI 0.81 to 1.38), a 23 percent increase .
SOURCE: Effects of Missouri’s Repeal of Its Handgun Purchaser Licensing Law on Homicides (PDF)