@Blickers,
Blickers wrote:Taiwan's example does not provide any evidence that gun control-or at least handgun control, which is where the murder problem is-won't lower our murder rate.
When you take Taiwan in context with all the other countries, some of which have lots of privately owned guns but a low homicide rate, it shows that gun availability has little connection to homicide rates.
I've heard before the claim that the problem is handguns as opposed to guns overall. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of good data that I know of that focuses on handguns alone.
Blickers wrote:Taiwan is something of an anomaly, because only 16% of its murders involved a firearm.
Why is that an anomaly? Even with all our gun deaths, the US's non-gun homicide rate often exceeds the total homicide rate of the European countries that we are frequently compared to.
Some of those European countries have lots of privately owned guns and have a low homicide rate.
There is just a very low correlation between gun availability and homicide rates.
Blickers wrote:There is no evidence that decreasing handgun murders will result in a huge upswing in murder by other means to compensate.
Most murders are committed by humans who may well choose the easiest method to commit murder with, but are perfectly capable of using other methods if the easiest method becomes more difficult.
Moving the focus specifically to handguns takes us into a realm where (as far as I know at least) there is little data to base any conclusions on.
Blickers wrote:Like I said, the nature of the country with its immigrant groups and other factors will always make America slightly more violent than other advanced nations, but not 400% more violent.
Our high levels of violence are caused by the third-world conditions in some of our neighborhoods.
