A history of violence: Evidence grows that gun violence in America is a product of weak gun laws [View all]

[HuckleB]

Evidence is growing that gun violence in America is a product of weak gun laws
http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21700596-evidence-growing-gun-violence-america-product-weak-gun-laws-guns?frsc=dg%7Cc

"WITH awful, numbing regularity Americans use high-powered, high-capacity firearms to carry out mass shootings. And with awful regularity, efforts to reform America’s gun laws in the wake of such tragedies fail. (Indeed, a recent paper published by the Harvard Business School found that a mass shooting leads to a 75% rise in measures easing gun control in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.) More than 30,000 people die in shootings in America each year; no other rich country suffers anywhere near that level of gun violence.

Opponents of gun control argue that such figures have things backwards. In their view, widespread gun ownership deters crime, and thus benefits society. Advocates of tighter restrictions on gun ownership disagree: they believe the spur to gun crime from the ready availability of weapons far outweighs the deterrent effects. Social scientists have long struggled to adjudicate, since, on the surface at least, the data are ambiguous.

Pro-gun groups point out that rates of gun ownership tend to be highest in rural, sparsely populated states, where crime rates are low. By the same token, over the past two decades, as the number of guns in America has risen sharply, crime rates have fallen. Yet even as the number of guns in America has grown, the share of households with a gun has dropped steadily. Research published in 2000 by Mark Duggan of the University of Chicago concluded that the homicide rate had been falling in tandem with the proportion of households where guns were kept. What’s more, the homicide rate was falling with a lag, suggesting that reduced gun ownership was causing the decline, and was not simply a side-effect of a falling crime rate.

Other studies have reached similar conclusions. An analysis published in 2014, for example, using detailed county-level data assembled by the National Research Council, a government-funded body, suggested that laws that allow people to carry weapons are associated with a substantial rise in the incidence of assaults with a firearm. It also found evidence that such laws might also lead to increases in other crimes, like rape and robbery. A recent survey of 130 studies concluded that strict gun-control laws do indeed reduce deaths caused by firearms.

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Interesting analysis.