Do More Guns Really Mean More Safety? [View all]

[SecularMotion]

Another month, another set of American gun massacres. This time it was the killing of three people at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, where a right-wing gunman took it upon himself to open fire on theatergoers watching an Amy Schumer movie on July 23. Just a few days prior, a troubled young Muslim man opened fire on a military recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, killing four people.

Of course, a month prior the country experienced another such travesty at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, where, again, a right-wing gunman killed nine people.

Such incidents are so common in America that they barely register or provoke outrage anymore. Since 1982, there have been 71 such mass murders, defined as an incident where a gunman kills at least four people. We average just over two such incidents a year in this country, or one about every five months. Of course, this discounts the much larger set of incidents in which gunmen killed fewer than four people, or the staggering number of crimes committed with firearms every year. Whatever way you look at it, guns are a major source of American insecurity and crime — no matter which disgraced scholar the NRA types drag out to make hoary, long-debunked arguments about how more guns equals less crime.

Those arguments, quite simply, are not true, and the best available evidence points to the opposite conclusion — that the more guns there are in a society, the more violence, crime and deaths attributable to guns there happens to be. As one sophisticated 2012 paper concludes, “the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge … is that aggravated assault rises when RTC [right-to-carry] laws are adopted.” Unfortunately, more empirical work demonstrating this isn’t likely to be very forthcoming, as the gun lobby has used its influence in Congress to block future federally-funded research into gun violence. However, suffice it to say that if you are angry enough at what science has to say about something to ban research, the evidence must not be going in your direction.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/do-more-guns-really-mean-more-safety-ask-australia/208533/