Well, IMHO suicide is a basic human right, and altho impulsive suicides are often tragic, true- but this would also make planned suicides more difficult. So, that’s a wash. I’d much rather someone with 2 months of extreme pain to live from cancer to end it with a bullet that driving into oncoming traffic or stepping in front of a train.
*Impulsive *murder rates would likely decline. Premeditated- no significant decrease.
Rape, armed robbery, home invasion- would all increase. Especially home invasion. Big strong men with baseball bats could do anything they wanted, with no fear.
Successful suicides would go down even further, because few suicide methods have the success rate of guns - particularly if you look at suicide methods that are done in the spur of the moment.
Everybody in this thread is missing something. The OP stated that all guns possessed by American civilians disappear, but didn’t postulate anything preventing people from going out and getting new ones. Gun makers’ businesses would boom as people frantically tried to replace their lost guns. Gun imports would skyrocket. There probably would be some negative overall impact because the loss of all of those guns is a loss of wealth and people would spend money replacing them they would normally have spent on something else.
Gun crime and suicides would of course be affected in the short term. Long term? I give it 5 years and things would be back to pretty much as they are now. Just a lot of people are a bit poorer than they were before.
That might be a failure of imagination. Our suicide rate is dead average for OECD countries. I’m sure that we might experience a temporary dip in suicides but determined suicidal people (the kind that shoot themselves) are probably going to kill themselves.
Are you seriously proposing that our suicide rate would drop to less than half the OECD average? Probably not, so you would probably acknowledge that there would be a substitution effect as more people poisoned themselves, hanged themselves and jumped off buildings. Perhaps not 100% substitution but I have no reason to believe that our suicide rate would be much lower today in the absence of guns. Do you?
I think you might have a much better argument here. If you cold magically take away all guns even from the criminals, I think it would be very hard to argue that our murder rate would not drop. A lot of the gun murders are committed by gangs and drug dealers. These encounters would be much less deadly if these had to use ball peen hammers and crossbows. But if you only removed guns from the hands of law abiding citizens and left them in the hands of criminals, I don’t think its hard to imagine that the murder rate wouldn’t move very much.
You are right of course and if you could remove guns from the hands of criminals, gangsters and drug dealers that easily, I think more people would support that than you think.
Who gives a shit about gun suicide rate. That’s like saying the suicide rate by jumping off of 10 story buildings was higher in states where there are a lot of 10 story buildings. What we care about is the overall suicide rate, isn’t it? The overall suicide rate doesn’t correlate nearly as well with gun ownership.
They would definitely and dramatically go down in urban areas like Chicago. It’s hard to wage ongoing gang wars in which several people are murdered at a time in drive by knifings. Rural areas are another matter, though. Those folks generally don’t drive up and down the streets in gangs whacking each other on a daily basis in the first place, so removing their guns wouldn’t have any real noticeable effect.
Those cites seems to establish a good correlation to me. I also find the part from the second cite about the gender differences interesting, and am curious if anyone else has some thoughts on that subject.
Only if you are foolish enough to believe that the only thing that affects the suicide rate is firearm ownership.
However, I am confused about something. I specifically restricted myself to American cites, because as you said in a different gun thread …
So why are you now bringing up Japan to mock my cites from two American research institutions? According to your own statements, which I am happy to cite on request, you can’t compare gun control from another country to America. So WTF does Japan have to do with anything here?
Gun sellers in America are generally civilians, so all their stock would disappear too, including all unshipped stock at american factories and distributors. (And stuff in transit too, for that matter.) It would take a little while to re-arm america, even if no moves (political or otherwise) are made to prevent that from occurring.
