A (DU) minority view on guns.

[DanTex]

91. Funny that, since I didn't propose a specific solution.

Our non-gun homicide rate is as high as Western European total homicide rates.

That's because their gun homicide rates are negligible. Our non-gun homicide rates are comparable to theirs, whereas our gun homicide rates are off the chart.

If guns were suddenly no longer available, then the gun-related murders that would have occurred would instead, many of them, be done with non-gun weapons. Our non-gun homicide rate would rise while our gun-homicide rate would plummet, and we'd still have a much higher homicide rate than other nations of comparable wealth.

That's an interesting hypothesis, but there's no evidence whatsoever to support it. Studies examining the link between guns and homicide in the US don't find any significant substitution effect. And the instrumentality factor -- that gun crimes/fights are much more likely to result in homicide -- is well documented.

Now you have a choice: bring down murder rates and boost the standard of living by addressing social and economic problems like the Europeans do, or bring down murder rates but not change the standard of living by addressing the hardware problem.

Or we can do both.

How low would those numbers need to be in order to make you happy?

If our homicide rate were lower than one other wealthy country, as opposed to higher by a huge margin, I wouldn't say I would be "happy", but I think that's a decent goal, at least for now.