OK, I'll give it a once over for how reasonable it is.
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Originally Posted by CMartucci  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 |
That's false to begin with, many crimes are comitted with guns, wanting them to be independant of one another is just words or wishful thinking. Guns are a tool, and a good tool to committ certain crimes with, which is why we have gun crimes to begin with.
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[*]Gun control can not be fairly compared among other nations, namely the UK
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That cannot be true, if one knows all relevant data, it can be statistically compared and described, with the appropriate caveats and margins of error. I think what you may mean is that most of the general published data is not sufficient to fairly compare the U.S. to other nations in terms of gun control.
That's possibly true (I haven't researched it but I have seen this stated a number of places). But please, make the distinction!
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[*]Guns do far more good to society than harm
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Why does Japan do OK with the most stringent gun control laws? Apparently there are other factors involved that can contradict that.
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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.
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Your conclusion is NOT logical. You note that it must NOT logically depend on the availability of guns, this is false. However, you may correctly claim it does not ONLY depend on the availability of guns, a much weaker, but correct, argument.
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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.
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You seem to be missing the actual point here.
If you give a tool that can be used to defend against, or commit crimes, among other things, to a population that does not committ crimes, and therefore has little need to defend against said crimes, *Why would you think adding guns would increase crime rate?*
If you take a less stable population that participates in a lot more crime, and you give them guns, you will expect to see more guns used in crimes, necessarily, and more fatalities as a result. This starts an arms race, now to defend against a crime you need a gun, since people comitting crimes have guns widely available.
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Source for child deaths by firearms and swimming pools: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, page 150
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This is entirely irrelevant to the argument. Lots of people die of Cancer. And...and nothing. It's irrelevant too.
-Mach