I have a natural educators tendency. Seeing someone clearly not taking the effort to think is, simply, annoying. Look at the argument that you two are trying to make: “We need to decrease legal guns to lower crime. Comparing legal guns to crime rates doesn’t count.” How does one make that argument with the intention of being intellectually honest?
I’ll fully well agree that looking at legal gun ownership and comparing that to crime is farcical, but that’s my point. If there’s no connection, and you’re agreeing there’s no connection, then why are you concerning yourself with legal gun ownership? If your goal is to decrease crime and to decrease illegal gun ownership, you need to show some evidence that there’s a connection between those two and legal gun ownership if you’re going to make the case that we need to decrease legal gun ownership. This isn’t an issue of guns and crime. It’s an issue of basic logic. I could plug any two, random words in there and the point would be the same. You’re making an argument where your points of debate are directly conflicting each other.
And let’s also not forget that we do have data about total gun ownership, including illegally owned weapons. Where there’s a gun death, there was almost certainly a gun. I’ll as well admit that where guns are available, people will prefer to use them as a means of committing murder so where I see more gun deaths, I’m happy to assume that there’s a fairly direct correlation with total gun ownership.
So, graph #1 - Legally Owned Guns (horizontal) vs. Total Guns Owned (vertical)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/gunsvgundeath.png
Is there a relation? I don’t see it.
Graph #2 - Total Guns Owned v. Homicide
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/gundeathvhomicide.png
Do I see a relation? Only if I include the US. But given the relationship between poverty and crime, I’d certainly want to look at how the US stands on that front before accepting that the US is in the upper right due to gun ownership rather than due to social inequality.
Graph #3 - Gini Coefficient (lower is better) v. Homicide
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/ginivhomicide.png
As expected, we see the US out away from the pack. If we take out the USA from graph 2, all that’s left is an amorphous blob. And given that we’ve already determined that comparing between countries with different rates of poverty is shady, let’s go ahead and look at a vertical sample (i.e. with roughly the same gini coefficient) from the center of our European blob in graph 3.
Graph #4 - Total Gun Ownership v. Homicide for Similar Income Distribution
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/gundeathvhomicide2.png
Do you see a link? Canada maybe bumps the right side a bit higher. But really, Switzerland has more guns than Canada and half as many homicides. The margin for error is so wide that applying a line is really just being dishonest. But more importantly, regional differences are obviously of more importance than gun law. What’s the difference between Canada and Switzerland? Culture? Who knows. Ultimately, if you actually want to accomplish something, you’re better off to figure out what that difference is and apply it to the US.