Seems like I ran across an article some months ago pointing out how many courts/judges have gotten to where they all but refuse to explain this concept to jurors. Apparently few serving jurors are aware of it. Of course basic civics knowledge isn't a requirement for serving on a jury...or voting....or running for congress...the White House...Attorney General...
Harvard Study: No Correlation Between Gun Control And Less Violent Crime
- Thread starter Max E.
- Start date
What you say is in fact somewhat supported by the report. And it's the reason that I think even if one could have a highly effective (in terms of identifying criminals and lunatics), thorough and universal background checking system and gun tracking, we might not see a significant drop in the murder rate -- for precisely the reason you state-- though we might still see a drop in the number of crimes committed using guns, simply because there are some crimes for which it is hard to imagine another weapon serving nearly so well. (I am not concerned with suicide rates here)
On the means of murder the report is weakest. The report mainly concerns itself with correlations between gun ownership and murder rates, and finds that there is no correlation. For most of the data we do not have the breakdown as to the means of murder -- was it gunshot or otherwise? Those data surely exist somewhere, as when someone dies, it is virtually universal to record the means of death. .
We are given a couple of examples where countries had lower gun ownership, or guns were banned, and yet the murder rate was high, and it is specifically mentioned that murder by gunshot was less than by other means. But by and large the report, for all its strengths, makes a somewhat weaker case with regard to substitution of some other form of murder for gunshot. And I would not quite agree that the primary feature of the report was proving that if you don't have a gun available you will just as easily murder someone by another means. Even where gun ownership is much lower than in the U.S., but the murder rate is higher, it doesn't necessarily mean that the fraction of murders committed by gunshot is lower, it could be, but without the breakdown of the data we can't tell.
I am certainly not disagreeing with you when you say that if a gun isn't available the report shows that another means of murder can be used, and clearly is in some countries, but in my opinion that isn't the main thrust of the article, but rather it seems to me that the main thrust is the lack of any correlation between gun ownership and murder rate -- the observation that there are at least a couple countries that have high murder rates but relatively low rates of murder by gunshot notwithstanding.
You are probably perfectly correct, but my feeling is that a weak point of the report is the case made for another means of murder being substituted to the same extent that murder by gunshot would have occured were there more guns available. The problem we run into is not knowing how many more murders, if any, would have occured had there been more guns.
Thus I concluded that we are still unsure whether background checks and weapons tracking would be effective in at least some societies, if indeed it were possible to do it well. The strong correlation between prior criminal activity and gun crime strongly suggests, that background checks might be effective, if only they could be stringently carried out. While at the same time the casual observation that in some countries murders by means other than gunshot out number those by gunshot, is mitigating. Of course, if guns are banned, this is to be expected. Regardless, I think we will agree that barring onerous registration and tracking of all guns, there is little chance of background checks succeeding in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.
1.) In your mind, what would the purpose of banning guns be, if there was no drop in the rate of deaths as a result?
2.) WHAT DOES IT MATTER? If 150 people were murdered last year, and 150 people will be murdered next year regardless of whether or not guns exist, why would people ban guns?
3.) you dont seem to get it, the whole point of the study is that gun ownership has no impact on murder rates, what difference does it make if one country has zero guns but their murder rate is the exact same as a country where everyone has a gun.
This, in my personal opinion, should be our guiding principle in passing laws in general. Sadly we pass many laws, often in the name of security or safety, that are little more than an ineffective and useless placebo but impinge on the personal freedom of many, and in the worst cases cause great inconvenience and cost far out of proportion to any real or imagined benefit.
We are slowly burying ourselves under a mountain of rules and regulations that may, at best, benefit a few; yet in subtle ways harm many.