Yes. I was initially addressing UltraVires’s claim that Australia and the UK have “banned guns”. They certainly have not. You then asked, as I understood it, if guns are readily available how does that solve the suicide problem. I was answering that question, in terms of how other countries do it. Perhaps I misunderstood the question, but I wasn’t trying to provide a recipe for what the US should do. I agree that there’s an issue with precedent, specifically the Heller ruling. This is going to be a major obstacle to sensible regulation until and unless it’s reversed. I don’t consider the Second Amendment itself, properly interpreted, to be much of a problem.
No. Just no. There’s a lot of really bad logic there. First of all, if we want to know about gun violence, particularly gun homicides, the appropriate metric to use is the gun homicide rate, not some proxy that obscures the data by introducing major extraneous factors. In particular, the total homicide rate is a potentially very bad metric because there are many different reasons for low or high homicide rates that may have nothing whatsoever to do with guns.
Now, here’s the interesting thing about that. The total homicide rate might actually be a useful metric provided that you limited your comparison to countries that were culturally and economically similar to the US, so that there was a minimum of extraneous factors driving homicides like ruthless dictatorships, political unrest, or major warring drug cartels that one finds in many developing or third-world countries. Even so, firearm homicides would be a better metric. Ideally, one would have both. The first cite that I gave meets all three criteria for statistical validity: it examines 22 countries that are in approximate socioeconomic parity with the US, and it lists firearm-related homicide rates and suicide rates, and it also lists total homicide and suicide rates.
The second cite I gave in response to DrDeth extends the comparison to a larger and much more heterogeneous group of 75 countries. The validity of such a comparison is much lower but at least we’re comparing apples with apples because we have solid data on firearm homicides.
But when DrDeth tries to provide stats for every country in the world – thus throwing out the principal statistical safeguard of comparing only countries with socioeconomic parity – and then rejects my second cite with firearm homicide rates and wants to use only total homicide rates while at the same time comparing countries with vast socioeconomic and political differences – thus throwing out the last bit of potentially meaningful comparison – the result is pure statistical garbage. We have the US sitting down in the lower (bad) half of world homicide statistics but what it tells us about the contribution of guns to violence is precisely zero.
And, indeed, if you actually look at the countries in that bad high-violence lower half in which the US sits, their characteristics are pretty much identical to the countries below the US in my list of 75 countries ranked by firearm homicides, namely, they are mostly countries with violent histories, unstable governments, great poverty, and/or gang and drug cartel dominated conflicts. This is a ridiculous standard of comparison and even if it seems objectively fair to just compare “every country in the world”, the fact is that world is comprised of a very large number of really, really shitty and violent developing countries and comparing the US with them may be a feel-good exercise but it’s useless from an information standpoint. The argument might be presented in all sincerity, but it’s fundamentally not an honest argument.
The facts I stated about guns as suicide enablers have been noted in a number of epidemiological studies, but suicide rates tend to be quite variable among countries even with socioeconomic similarities. It does appear that the US rate is higher than Canada, Australia, and the UK, to cite some of the most similar countries, which is likely because of gun availability, but I grant you that, unlike gun homicides, the evidence for causation is much weaker.
I think these objections have now been well addressed. I continue to be perplexed by this insistence on making completely irrelevant comparisons with vastly different countries, which are useless for the multiple reasons I described above. Why, for instance, is there any relevance whatsoever in comparing the US with “the Americas”? Because both have “America” in their name? “The Americas” includes central and south America, which contain some of the most unstable and violent countries on the planet. The only possible point of such a comparison is if one is disingenuously trying to show that US gun violence is “not that bad”. You and DrDeth like to claim that the US is only about halfway down in the global list of countries ranked by total homicide rate; here’s the operative question: look at the countries that rank worse than or even similar to the US; would you want to live in any of them?
Only in Scalia’s fevered imagination, and that of similarly inclined ideologues. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that.
In any case, that interpretation, bolstered by nonsense like “stand your ground” laws, are largely responsible for the plague of gun violence.
