Alright, it IS About Gun Control

People kill people with guns. Restrict gun access, reduce killings. Right?

I wish.

The data indicates it’a bit trickier than that. Let’s look at some examples.

Okay now this just looks ridiculous. Americans own tons of guns; there’s no way the United States has the lowest violent crime rate out of all these countries!

Then again, it may not be fair to compare different countries with different criminal categorizations. England and Wales dramatically improved their reporting system during that spike, so this graph could be quite exaggerated.

Let’s take a different approach. Countries with high levels of gun ownership should have higher rates of homicide, right? How’s Europe look?

Russia and Luxembourg have incredibly low rates of gun ownership—the result of government bans—and yet they have the highest murder rates on the list. Norway, Germany, and France all have fairly high rates of gun ownership and dramatically lower murder rates. There seems to be no correlation in European countries between gun ownership and the murder rate.

But again, a lot of this could be attributable to cultural differences, reporting differences, enforcement differences.

Australia passed strict gun regulation after the Port Arthur massacre. Let’s look at violent crime data before and after that regulation was passed.

Now I’m no statistician, but it appears to me that Australia’s strict gun control laws had little to no effect on their homicide rate. The expiration of America’s ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, on the other hand, was followed by a reduced homicide rate. Not that correlation equals causation, but Australia’s declining homicide rate was hardly helped by their gun regulations.

The UK is worse.

Ouch. No one wants to see an upward trend in homicides, especially when it’s their gun control poster child. But despite the UK’s trajectory, they still have lower rates of homicide than the US. Don’t they?

Well it turns out comparison is made difficult by differences in recording methods. In the United States, crimes are recorded based on initial data. That means that if a body is reported and the death wasn’t the result of suicide or natural causes, it’s tallied as a homicide straight away. In the United Kingdom, they do things a little differently.

Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction, or where the person is not prosecuted on grounds of self defense or otherwise.

The United States records justified homicides, homicides in cases of self defense, and killings by cops—all when they happen, not after investigation and conviction. If the UK recorded homicides like the US does, its rate would more than double.

But I’m an American, so why should I care about the stats for the rest of the world? Gimme some American stats dammit!

Washington, D.C. implemented strict gun regulations in 1976. In 2008, the Supreme Court struck down the ban as unconstitutional. In this time, Washington averaged a 73% higher murder rate than it did just before the ban. The United States as a whole, between 1976 and 2008, averaged an 11% lower murder rate.

In 1982 Chicago banned handguns. Since then, the portion of murders committed with handguns has averaged 40% higher than it was when the ban was passed.

At this point it seems pretty clear that gun bans don’t even prevent firearm homicides, much less homicides in general. In fact, Florida’s graph suggests that right-to-carry laws might curb homicides.

Florida passed its right-to-carry law in 1987, and has since averaged 36% fewer homicides. The United States as a whole only averaged 15% fewer homicides in the same time period.

From the Harvard paper Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?:

Whether gun availability is viewed as a cause or as a mere coincidence, the long term macrocosmic evidence is that gun ownership spread widely throughout societies consistently correlates with stable or declining murder rates. Whether causative or not, the consistent international pattern is that more guns equal less murder and other violent crime. Even if one is inclined to think that gun availability is an important factor, the available international data cannot be squared with the mantra that more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death. Rather, if firearms availability does matter, the data consistently show that the way it matters is that more guns equal less violent crime.

Building a safer society isn’t exactly intuitive. Data helps.