Dr. Evil
20×102mm Vulcan
MORE FIREARMS DO NOT EQUAL MORE MURDERS
by Kevin Ryan
People who favor gun control believe that, if we have fewer firearms, we'll have less violence. If that was the case, countries with the most access to firearms would have the highest murder rates. Yet that's not the case. Contrary to conventional wisdom, more guns in a country do NOT lead to more murders.
And for those who counter that “you can’t compare the U.S. to poor, developing countries,” you’re actually making my point. Other factors, not firearm ownership, determine the amount of homicides in a country.
And the data verifies that. The number of firearms per capita plays almost no role in determining the homicide rate. Running a regression with the data shows that the number of guns in a country account for less than 2% of the variation in homicide rates. What’s more, the relationship between guns and murder is actually inverted. The more guns there are in a country, the FEWER homicides there are.
In other words, gun control advocates are barking up the wrong tree. If you truly want to address violence in society, you have to figure out WHY people attack each other, not HOW they attack each other.
SOURCES:
Homicide rates - U.N. data - “Intentional Homicide” means unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person. It does not include death due to legal intervention, justifiable homicide in self-defense, and death due to armed conflict. http://www.unodc.org/…/datap…/PublicationReports2017_1a.xlsx
Private firearm ownership - Small Arms Survey - Civilian firearms only. http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/…/Small-Arms-Survey-2007-Cha…
Regression -
