This is from an
article I wrote (and recently made a speech about), and I figured I'd post it here and see what everyone has to say.
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I'm going to attempt to prove three things:
- Guns and crime exist completely independently of one another
- Gun control can not be fairly compared among other nations, namely the UK
- Guns do far more good to society than harm
The first problem occurs when people claim that America would be safer if only we restricted, or even got rid of guns entirerly.
It is time that we ban handguns. We have to do that in order to protect our cities. -Dennis Kucinich
This claim is simply false. I will attempt to prove this through use of example. Canada and France have roughly the same amount of guns per capita as the United States, yet only a 5th of the crime. The same goes for France. Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote a few months ago:
Quote:
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In 1999, 39 percent of households in the United States had a gun in them. There were 3.72 (per 100,000) gun-related homicides in that year. Norway suffered only 0.30 homicides a few years earlier, a number well under that of the United States. Yet 32 percent of households in Norway had a gun, only 7 percent less than US households. Similar statistics are evident in France with 22.6 percent of households with guns and only 0.44 gun-related homicides.
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Source 1
See the following chart to put this into perspective:
As you can see, even though France and Canada have roughly the same amount of guns per capita, their crime rate is much lower. Thus, their low crime rate must logically depend on another factor, and not the availability of guns.
Here is another example (from another article I wrote
)disproving the correlation between gun availability and crime:
Quote:
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In 1994 the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was passed which limited gun purchases and required mandatory background checks. In 1993, prior to the act, firearm death-rates were 6.77 per 100,000. In 1994, when the act was passed, firearm deaths were 6.45, indicating that the act had decreased gun-violence. However, in 1997 the act was declared unconstitutional, and did firearm homicides go up after that? No. They continued to drop, and in 1998 firearm homicide rates were 4.21, a 0.55 drop from 1997, a much larger drop than that between 1993 and 1994 when the bill was enacted.
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As you can see, even though the act seemed to be working, crime was going down anway.
Source 2
The second problem occurs when people attempt to use the UK as an argument in favor of gun restrictions. England, with strict gun controls, has almost no gun murders and a very low murder rate. Doesn't this show that gun control is effective in reducing murder rates? Well not so fast. First of all, prior to having any gun controls, England
already had a homicide rate much lower than that of the United States. Second of all, comparing nations with such widely differeing cultures and legal systems is an illogical procedure. Consider this, taken from an article written in the 90's:
Quote:
Unlike murder, rape seldom involves a gun...While 62% of murders in the U.S. in 1981 involved a firearm, only 7% of rapes did so...Therefore, if crime rates in the U.S. and Britain can be fairly compared, we should find that British rape rates were equal to U.S. rape rates, minus the 7% of U.S. rapes committed with guns.
The 1984 British Crime Survey reported 2,288 rapes in England and Wales -- an area with a population of 49 million people! This gives 4.67 rapes per 100,000 people...By comparison, America's rape rate for 1987 was 73 per 100,000 female. [This gives 36.5 per 100,000 people.] Subtracting the 7% of U.S. rapes that are committed with firearms gives 34 rapes per 100,000 people -- far higher than Britain's rate.
Britain's very low rape rate must be more than just the absence of firearms -- much more.
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Source 3
(For reference, here is a list of factors assembled by the FBI which DO cause crime. Note that the availability of guns is absent from the list:
http://www.guncite.com/gcgfbirc.html)
The third problem occurs when people claim that guns can not be beneficial to society. A lot of people assume that guns take more lives than they save. That, however, is untrue. "Guns prevent an estimated 2.5 million crimes a year, or 6,849 per day...Often the gun is never fired and no blood (including the criminals) is shed." "Every day, 550 rapes, 1,100 murders, and 5,200 other violent crimes per day are prevented just by showing a handgun.
Source 4
That's 1,100 murders that are prevented
every day! Compare that to the 175 children who are killed by guns
each year. So we can get rid of guns and save those 175 children each year, OR in the same year we can keep guns and save well over 400,000!
The fact is, the danger of guns is mostly media hype. In reality, more children die in swimming pools then from accidental shootings in the home. In fact, you are roughly 100 times more likely to die in a pool then in accidental gunplay.
Source for child deaths by firearms and swimming pools:
Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, page 150
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So in conclusion, guns and crime have nothing to do with each other. They exist independently. A country with limited availability of guns is not necesarilly safer than a country with easy access to guns. In fact, Switzerland which has one of the largest gun supplies in the world is one of the safest countries in the world (Source:
Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies...sorry for the bias source lol. I encourage you to check me on this.)
The fact is, guns generally benefit society more than it hurts it. Guns level the playing field for people who might not feel safe living alone, especially elderly couples. I urge you all to consider all of these things. Guns are not nearly as dangerous as the media would have you think.