Point Click, Fire: An Undercover Investigation of Illegal Online Gun Sales

[DanTex]

110. What is descriptive and enlightening is the fact that the US has by far the highest gun homicide...

...rate of any wealthy nation. The reason I bring up non-gun crimes is as a type of control. If there were some other cause for our uniquely high gun violence rate besides gun availability, then it would presumably result in high rates for other kinds of crimes, not just homicides and gun crimes specifically. For example, if income inequality were responsible, we'd expect to see the US have higher rates for, say, robbery. But we don't: for crimes other than gun homicide, we are not way out of line with the rest of the industrialized world. So that's a pretty good indication that gun availability is playing a role.

The US has 35% of the world's private firearms. Does the US also have 35% of the world's murders? If firearms cause murder, there must be some science that proves it, otherwise this whole idea is just conjecture.

There are a lot of factors that govern homicide rates. Gun availability is just one of them. In social sciences in general, you are never going to find a perfect correlation like you are seeking. But the data do show that gun ownership rates correlate with homicide rates. As you point out, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but there are pretty strong arguments for causation as well, for example the fact that you don't find nearly as strong a correlation between gun ownership rates and non-gun crime rates, as I discussed above.

Sarcasm alert: Are you saying that black markets don't flourish in areas where some type of prohibition is present?

What I'm saying is that there are many factors that determine how big a black market you will have when faced with restrictions or prohibitions -- it depends on the supply and demand. Pro-gunners often argue that any kind of prohibition is doomed to failure, arguing by analogy using prohibition of alcohol in the US as an example, but, obviously, guns and alcohol are nothing alike. In reality, while some restrictions and/or prohibitions have failed, other prohibitions have been remarkably successful.

For example, in the US, machine guns are mostly prohibited, but there is not much of a black market. In Japan, guns are basically prohibited, and again not much of a black market. It is far easier for a criminal in the US to get a gun than for a criminal in Japan to get one.

So, aside from the reflexive argument that "prohibitions always lead to a black market", I don't see reason to believe that tightening up gun laws in the US will lead to any significant increase in black market activity. On the contrary, laws like requiring background checks on private sales, or national registration of handguns, would actually reduce black market activity by making it more difficult to divert and traffic legal guns to criminal markets, thus cutting down on the supply of illegal guns.