I have been looking at statistics and find them interesting. Sites like nationmaster.com and others have murder rates and other violent crime rates. I have not seen any correlation between legal gun ownership and murder rates. Some nations have tight gun restrictions and high murder rates (Mexico, South Africa), while others have legal gun ownership with lower murder rates. (Switzerland) Those may be anomalies.
It might be intuitive to think that low gun ownership will translate into lower rate of murders by guns. This may provide some consolation for those who think being murdered with a gun is particularly odious. But here in the Bethel household, when you are dead, you're dead!
If you are interested in having a lower murder rate then addressing the social factors that lead to violence and murder would be useful and productive. Putting a prohibition on one of the murder weapons has not been proven to have any permanent effect on the overall rates of murder, and will certainly create a large infrastructure of black market suppliers and corruption in the manner that drug prohibition has done. Gun prohibition would almost certainly follow this model unless a nation has very tight controls over what crosses its borders. There is one other part of this issue that is overlooked in the nationmaster statistics. Firearms are often used to repel potential violence, usually without being discharged. The number of attacks that are prevented must be taken account of when doing a cost benefit analysis.
There are no simplistic sound bite answers to using a firearm policy to reduce violent and deadly crime.
Very likely I pissed everone off here tonight. Good.
