Woodruff wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:aad0906 wrote:In 2010 the homicide rate in the United States was 4.8 per 100,000 inhabitants (
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cr ... 0tbl01.xls). In The Netherlands it was 0.87 (
http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publicat ... STB=T&VW=T)
I can name several other European (gun control) countries where the murder rate is similarly low.
It is a fact that fewer gun lead to less homicides. Don't get me wrong, I am not against gun ownership in the USA. It is a part of the American culture and nobody will ever ban gun ownership.Heck, once I gte my citizenship I might get one myself (plus a safe plus adequate training). But if you are going to have gun ownership there will simply be more gun related deaths too. Mall shootings, University shootings, etc. Of course this happens in Europe too (seethe Anders Breivik case in Norway), just way less frequent. Doesn't take a communist to understand that. Sure, criminals in The Netherlands still have guns. They might use them in robberies too. But they don't go into malls, universities etc. to randomly shoot people. Or take dady's gun out of his nightstand and accidentally kill a sibling.
Actually, it isn't. There may be a positive correlation, but from what I recall, it's very weak. People simply seek substitutes like knives, bats, etc.
Do you believe the same sort of damage is very likely to be done by a single assailant with a knife or bat as is done by a single assailant with a gun?
From what I recall on the literature, homicide rates, break-ins, robbery, rapes, and the like were very similar regardless of the gun control laws. Sometimes, you'd see a decrease in one type of crime but an increase in another. Much of the discrepancy is more related to the other factors: "legal systems (laws, legislation, prisons, enforcement), cultural attitudes, regulation, public policy, homogeneity of the population, unemployment rates, and neighboring countries, to name a few."
So, to answer your question, sure, someone with two glocks can kill more people in one shorter instance, but people notice this because of its shock value. People don't notice the 33% unemployment rate of black males under the age of 25 or so. People don't notice that the deaths on government roads per year is 40,000. People don't notice that homicide rates in European countries don't vary that much from the US. I don't think stricter gun control laws (or the complete abolition of guns) would be worth it.
For example, with roads, the government forms many laws and bureaucracies which help reduce these deaths (drinking ages, DMVs, traffic laws, etc.), but even with these regulations in place, are they updating or innovating? Is the problem effectively being addressed while similarly not reducing the quality of life for others at some unacceptable level? If we want almost 0 deaths per year, let's mandate that a knife--pointed at the driver--should be placed in the steering wheel of every car. That'll make people drive very carefully...