We wake up one morning and find that all the guns in America not in the hands of police or military have magically disappeared. Would the murder and suicide rates rise, lower, or remain the same?
Suicide rates would quite obviously go down. I cannot think of any semi-serious arguments to the contrary.
I am very sure murder rates would fall quite a lot, too, but you’ll get some argument from some folks there.
The point of a gun is to make it easier to kill something. Making it harder to kill something means fewer of them will be killed. To construct an argument where murder rates go up you have to construct an argument that the lack of guns will encourage successful murder more than the lack of them will make it likelier or harder for murders to be committed.
Murder rates would decline, suicide would probably stay the same.
Japan and South Korea have very strict gun control laws, and they have more suicides per capita than the US. If you take guns away people will just kill themselves by hanging, pills or jumping instead.
Planned suicides probably yes, impulsive ones maybe not. Having to go out and buy the means to do it is a barrier that may be sufficient for some depressed people, a barrier that doesn’t exist if the means to do it quickly and reliably are right there in your nightstand.
There’s some thought that suicide is contagious in a way - that knowing someone who did it, or knowing it happens frequently, may lower your own resistance to doing it. That forest in Japan noted for people walking into it and hanging themselves is so embedded in the culture there that maybe it makes copycatting acceptable to someone who might otherwise have survived depression. Yes, it’s a complicated subject, but yes, reducing the availability of easy means *has *to reduce the number of people who go through with it.
There are about 33,000 gun deaths per year in America. If guns didn’t exist, those 33,000 people wouldn’t be killed by guns. Now, it is undeniably true that some percentage would be killed by other means (i.e. it is easy to imagine the scenarios - instead of suicide by gun, suicide by hanging; instead of killing an assailant with a gun, you kill them with a bat).
But would it be 100%?
Given that guns allow for immediate action, which is often fatal, and the other alternatives to using a gun usually take longer, require more deliberation and planning, and aren’t as certain in the result (all reasons that guns are more useful for the purpose of subduing another living thing), I’m pretty certain that it would be far below 100%.
We have real life evidence that seem to disagree with this statement
In England the most popular method of suicide used to be sticking your head into a coke gas oven. In the early sixties, they switched to the much less toxic natural gas. From 1963 to 1978 the number of English suicides by gas dropped from 2,368 to eleven and the country’s overall suicide rate decreased by one-third. Despite England’s varying unemployment rate and social stresses since then, it has remained at this lower level.
Scott Anderson, author of the New York Times Magazine article, “The Urge to End It All,” notes in his article “that states in which gun ownership are highest have the highest rates of suicide by gun; in fact, the higher rates of gun ownership closely track the higher rates of gun suicides by state. Yet suicide rates by other means remain roughly similar.”
Also from the article “The Urge to End It All” " is a cite of a study of survivors that said only 13 percent reported thinking about committing suicide for eight hours or longer; 70 percent said they thought about it for less than an hour; and a whopping 24 percent said the idea had occurred to them less than five minutes before their attempt."
It seemed to work for Australia.
That was not a good cite:
Happily, Australians seem to be killing themselves and each other less. Kudos to them. The research seems inconclusive on whether that was due to gun control or other factors.
We had a world without guns for most of human history. It was far more violent than today. Strong young men basically ruled everyone physically weaker than themselves, excepting the very wealthy, who could hire those strong men to work for them.
Isn’t that why we have police and criminal justice? I think that has far more to do with why we don’t have bullies wandering the countryside raping and looting these days, right?
That could just as well indicate that coal fumes, like lead, cause people to act in an altered state. The Us has held a fairly static suicide rate since 1960 so, by your own metric, the UK had a higher rate in 1960. They are currently at about 1/2 the rate of the US. At 3X their current, they would have been at 1.5X the US at the same time, in 1960.
As best I can tell, gun ownership in the UK has been nominal since the start of the 20th century.
And how does that track with income?
Rather than compare to a country with a very different culture wrt suicide, you could compare different states:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923
That study looks at American states with high gun ownership vs low ownership. It pretty solidly shows a lot less gun suicides in low ownership states with no corresponding rise in non-gun suicides.
This would only be true if there was any scientific evidence that coal fumes cause people to act in an altered state. Do you have a cite for that assertion?
Death rates would INCREASE because all the gun fanatics would become so depressed, they would kill themselves.
I would question that statement. Mankind certainly has had a history of violence and oppression. But it has also been a history of laws and government. In spite of how we portray them in movies and TV, I suspect that most people living in ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, feudal Japan, the American Olde West and other eras did not endure non-stop murder, banditry, warlordism, ninja attacks and gunfights at high noon any more that the average American experiences constant terrorist bombings, mass shootings and gang violence (in spite of what is played on the news constantly).
But how?!
You think guns are what led to modern society?
It took the mongols 150 years to kill fewer people than ww2 killed in 6, and the mongol conquest was the deadliest conflict in history by several times before guns were invented.
The entire 5 centuries-long military history of the Western Roman Empire was less bloody than ww1.
Going further back, you have the Native American genocide, the Russian civil war, the Communist revolution in China, the Soviet-era Ukranian famine, and a thousand other extremely bloody violent conflicts the scope of which would have been unthinkable to an ancient Spartan.
Yeah, things weren’t exactly peachy back then, either. I’m not saying guns made people more violent, I’m just saying it made the killing a LOT more efficient. Guns did to murder what the industrial revolution did to manufacturing. It wasn’t guns that civilized us, but rather a gradual process of political developments leading to more widespread education and greater wealth.
People who become suicidal are influenced by many things in their choice of means.
The numbers that would definitely go down:
Accidental gun shootings. No toddlers would get ahold of their parent’s gun and shoot themselves.
Mass murders. There would be the occasional mass stabbing, but the body counts would be lower.
The number of people killed in encounters with the police would drop significantly. If the police were certain that nobody they interact with is carrying a gun, they would be less inclined to kill suspects.
They would certainly go down, especially in the short term but probably in the long term as well. Suicide would have a large dip initially, but would probably rebalance after that as people used alternative means. It would still be lower than today, but I could see it going down sharply after the guns magically disappeared and impulse suicides didn’t have the means to act on their impulse declined, then probably back up as people in our culture found a different acceptable alternative( or alternatives). It would never get back to being as high as it is with guns. Murder would be similar. Initially you could see a large decline in both murder and probably armed robbery, since guns facilitate that, but eventually it would rise again as alternatives were found, but it would never get back to the point it is today.