Wow. What a force you must be when you do disagree entirely with someone 
Twice, I prepared nice long replies to your views on statistics, registration (guns and knives), and the substitution effect, and twice they vanished into the ether. Co-incidence? Or the long arm of the mysterious, shadowy and terrifyingly puissant “gun lobby”?
Umm, co-incidence.
In reverse order: the net effect of a less than 100% substitution effect is a reduction in crime. Knives are less susceptible to registration than guns because of the kitchen knife effect: to wit, most attacks happening in the home, the knife is a weapon of opportunity. That was brief, the bit on statistics take longer.
Basically, I accept that statistics can always be legitimately challenged, other causes suggested, etc. So while I think that Australia is a good example of registration in action, I don’t expect you to fall over yourself agreeing. I think, in future, in any debate, I’m going to ask people first what they consider would constitute sufficient proof of <whatever>. Sometimes they’ll ask for something impossible (e.g. creationists asking to see half an eye); other times it’ll help determine what should be presented.
Heck, I’ll ask now. What post-registration trends in a) homicide, b) gun violence and c) other crime would you, Freedom, WAE and others consider proof that registration worked? And would you accept that if it worked in Oz, or wherever, it would be likely to work in the US? (If you only want US-based proof, registration would have to happen in the US: say, a 10 year enactment of registration, to be automatically rescinded should pre-determined targets not be met. Would provide proof, yes, but perhaps a touch extreme.)
I don’t expect ever to see anything as clear cut as, say, registration enacted = 20% drop in murder rate over and above whatever other trends are present, simply because crime statistics are too noisy a channel to allow us to extract that kind of data. Equally, I would be astonished to see an equally unequivocal proof of more guns=less crime, or the benefits of DGU. Both sides have to accept that this evidence will never exist. So what? Does this mean that, lacking clear proof, we should fight to maintain the status quo - no gun control, no “Shall issue” CCW licences? I doubt it. So either we abandon statistics as evidence, or we agree on a level of “actionable probability”, which will be damn tricky.
Some of the more recent comments about the US gun control/anti gun lobby serve to make clear to me the suspicious attitude I seem to have met with. I’d like to make two points about my attitude to guns
[list=1]
[li]I come from the UK (Scottish, working in London). Even before 1994, guns were never very common. So I tend to disagree with the view that a) guns are necessary to protect individuals from crime, b) guns are necessary to preserve freedon or c) gun ownership is a right equivalent to free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech etc. So I get involved in gun threads. This might be something which, in the interests of spare time and sanity, I need to rethink.[/li][li]I also didn’t appreciate that, by presenting pro-control arguments, I seem to ally myself with what sounds like a collection of the hysteric and the simplistic. This does tend to explain other posters comments along the lines of “this reveals your true agenda,” “this is totalitarian”, which I was kind of at a loss to explain. FTR, I’m neither hysteric nor simplistic, nor are my views formed by exposure to the arguments of HCI or Sarah Brady, whoever the hell she may be. Equally, I don’t represent anyone other than myself.[/li][/list=1]
