Naive?  Well in 1962 they said that the people who wanted to ban smoking were naive.  Look at how far we have come, not completely there yet, but we will be.  It will be the same with guns.  Just keep pushing and educate the public to the  danger of civilian owmership of guns.  It will take time and patience of course to get rid of them, but it can be done.

One thing in favor is we have a president, who I believe really wants some type of gun control.

jeff,

if you back out the homicides committed by African Americans, you will find the remaining population of America is still the most violent (partial) country in the industrialized world, all the more alarming since when you remove the stats for African Americans, it means that affluent America still kills more than any other rich country.

ted,

The Swiss own half the number of guns per capita that are owned in the US (47 per 100), and their homicide rate is 1/4 that of the US (0.77 per 100,000).  In fact, the data for Switzerland help prove my point that lower gun ownership rates result in fewer homicides.  In fact that data suggest that just reducing our ownership rate by half would save over 6,000 lives per year, which some people migh targue could be a good target.

As for comparing ourselves to Mexico, I've used information on the 23 industrialized countries (about a billion people) with a standard of living similar to ours.  They are the countries from which the majority of Americans' ancestors came, and which also most resemble us in robustness of national instituions (including law enforcement, etc).  Mexico is not in that group.  Gary has used the states in the US.  His data set and mine give different results.  Everyone can decide for themselves what kind of information they woud like to use to try and learn about solutions.  I would not choose Latin America to try and get insights on how to solve this problem.

Trying to figure out how to upload a plot like Gary's.  Looks like even pdf file doesn't work?

bartlettbooks wrote:

It just stands to reason that the fewer guns in civilian hands then the fewer gun deaths.

And exactly how do you propose to do that without either amending or ignoring the Second Amendment?

Neither is likely to happen anytime soon so what would you propose be done in the meantime other than jawboning the issue?

BTW: It just stands to reason that the fewer guns automobiles in civilian hands then the fewer gun automobile deaths.

Yet somehow i don't see you lobbying to do that.

Care to explain?

In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell

tdziemianowicz wrote:

Oh yeah ... so now you see the reasons for davey's comments.  Only one fifteenth the number of guns in the UK compared to here, and one fortieth the number of gun deaths.  I guess America can prefer to just argue that these kinds of facts are irrelevant to us, but the alternative approach would be to admit that sometimes we can learn from others.  We can always decide that the medicine is something we don't want to swallow (democratic process).  That's different from not even wanting to hear the diagnosis.

I think you are pursuing a faulty premise.Far more children are killed every year by drug abuse.  People are 72 times more likely to die from drug abuse.  People are 300 times more likely to die from alcohol abuse.  Yet liberals are largely pro-drug legalization.  You don't hear liberals demanding alcohol regulation or car regulation to protect the 34,000+ vehicle deaths a year.  So when you hear a liberal claim that we don't care about children or that even if it saves one child's life we have to act, that is a bogus and hypocritical argument.

All actions have costs.  Cars could be far more safe, but the cost to do so would be prohibitive.  If the cost of saving 1 child's life would cost taxpayers $1 trillion dollars, then I'm sorry, but unfortunately that is not a good investment.  We can't do everything that will minimize risk, that is just not possible.And the motivation by the left here is highly suspect,you can't use your car to defend yourself from a tyrannical government .

earl,

I am actually with you on our having much worse problems than guns in this country.  Gary has listed a few of them;  poor nutrition is an underlying cause of America falling behind the rest of the world in most measures of health, and is an increasing cause of our deficit / debt problem (as obesity causes diabetes and cardivascular disease, which are among the main culprits in escalation of health care costs).

I also agree that we lack perspective on cost-benefit in this country (TSA being one of the more obvious examples). 

As for automobiles, posters who have commented on that are probably aware that over many years the death rates (traffic fatalities per million vehicle miles) have been reduced enormously, in part due to regulations which at their onset were also seen as a curtailment of personal liberty, and which are now seen to have saved tens of thousands of lives per decade.  I was too young to remember, but I don't think automobile drivers had an advocacy group like the NRA to lobby against seat belts.       

Gary,

If you plot the data for the countries/regions I had in my post, the R squared is 0.85.  I also prepared an excel graph with a linear regression, but can't figure how to upload it.  I haven't plotted all the individual country data but the fit would be pretty similar, because it's strongly driven by the "outlier" data for the U.S. 

As I said in the earlier post, I selected out countries with per capita GDP 50% that of the US and higher, so we are talking about other wealthy countries that in many ways are "like us." Yes, you could say the Asian countries are not much like us, but it would not change the conclusion significantly.

As for correlation and causality, that's a matter of opinion, until you do the experiment, right? 

Hey  Bart,

"Let us declare the NRA a criminal organization.  That will give law enforcement the tools to deal with it.  Next confiscate all guns, and make the manufacture and importing of them illegal."

With such folks such as yourself on the liberal side our job is so much easier.

Gov Cuomo's proposed regs are right in line with what I expected although I'm unclear if the registration process includes current firearms, if so I will have a problem with that.

Based on the media reporting I've heard so far, registration is retroactive to include current firearms and clips over 7 rounds capacity are now illegal.  But since that's media reporting, I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of it.

And once again all this back and forth ignores a basic question: How many other countries have the right to bear arms as an integral part of their Constitution?

In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell

heymynameisearl wrote:

Far more children are killed every year by drug abuse.  People are 72 times more likely to die from drug abuse.

BAN ALL DRUGS IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We now see the results of groupthink in the largest cities of the republic formerly known as the greatest country in the world.

Karen, my point (and Odies to some degree) is that by comparing different countries, with different traditions, ethnicities, religions, laws, there are too many variables.

Let's think in terms of "early" death. Maybe we could subdivide into "violent" or "accidental". But even there, there is a gradation. How do you classify the woman who commits suicide after a lifetime of abuse?

I'm talking about, war, murder (gun and knives and blunt weapons and etc), suicide, overdose, toxins, aids, starvation, accident, abortion, fire, falls, etcetera, etcetera.

When you look at cost effective measures to avoid these events and prolong human life, smoke detectors and seat belts have saved more lives per buck than anything else in recent time (Those, and having the willpower to join other free nations to oppose homicidal, genocidal meglomaniacs). We didn't have to ban cars and ban fireplaces, and we certainly did not ban guns to effect these benefits. Technology, education and personal sacrifice saved those lives.

Bans are really really dumb. Even God (at least the one I adhere to) does not ban sin. God expects us to reject sin. Banning the occasion to sin is really just a lack of faith, when you look at it that way.

All bans do is set up illegal black markets where criminals can prosper. And criminals, having limited responsibility or empathy, bring other crimes in their wake.

The answer is education and freedom. We've got the freedom part figured out. But we gave up on teaching children personal responsibility, and lately, many are not even being trained to foster empathy.

If you're in favor of banning guns as a way of reducing violence, then obviously you should be in favor of banning drugs, alcohol, abortions, prostitution, women displaying their bodies, mental defectives, smoking, eating fatty foods, violent video games, eating sugar, DDT, CFC's PCB's mercury, asbestos, crystalline free silica (quartz, the most common mineral on the earth's surface, a KNOWN carcinogen).

There is a sexually transmitted disease that is 100% fatal. If we could ban it, all of our problems would be solved. I'm talking about life itself.

Ain't none of us getting out of here alive. All we can do is to try and be a force for good during our lives. I firmly believe that, when we stand in the halls of judgement, it is the style points that we have earned that will have made a difference.

What I think would give us the most "bang" for our "buck" right now would be to go back to teaching our children that they can make a difference, by learning to control their own lives, and to act as a positive influence to those around them, and we should practice what we teach.

"climate is what we expect weather is what we get" M. Twain

Hey why don't we ban everything?  Why don't we ban humans  The good Lord made a mistake when he created people.  Say to lighten things up a bit, who was Adam's first wife?

For some reason the smiley faces emoticons haven't worked for sometime.

Don't blame me; I didn't vote for the radical, socialist tyrant.