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branford

(4,462 posts)
7. Why only focus on states, when you can really dig down with the geography and demographics?
Thu Aug 13, 2015, 03:45 AM
Aug 2015

Look at the gun death rates by city, county, and congressional district (and age, race, profession, income, etc.), and the results are far more disturbing, and unfortunately raise very uncomfortable issues about race, class, urbanization, Democratic governance strategies, legislative priorities and approaches to crime, etc. Using your simplistic rationale, one could quite foolishly conclude that Democrats, the poor, and certain minorities are intrinsically more violent or prone to commit crimes with firearms, and areas with strong gun control are inherently more dangerous. Of course, rates of violence, firearm and otherwise, are more complicated that simple reliance on gun laws and correlation is most certainly not causation. One should always be careful when selectively using statistics to confirm ones own bias.

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/



Such data also does not fully account for the fact that gun deaths and injuries, and all violent crime, have been consistently and significantly falling all while the number of guns has been steadily increasing, ownership and carry laws have been pervasively liberalizing everywhere (along with the expiration of the Clinton-era "assault weapons" ban), and the Obama DOJ's own research indicated that most current gun control strategies are ineffective.

Courtesy of the DOJ (BJS and NIJ) and Pew Research:

http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1-kispbj31jpD1LvnFSDevryH2RmVvoLw1slOBZTe-suuy96Qq69nF9BhTmcw/edit

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