Ohio: Buckeyes for Concealed Carry President Uses Handgun to Defend Family

[DanTex]

132. Like I pointed out last time you made that silly argument...

...there is extensive evidence that more guns leads to more homicide. Of course, as any seven-year-old would understand, there are other factors involved, which is why the fact that crime has dropped while gun sales increased over a certain period of time doesn't prove or disprove anything. The concept you need to read up about is ceteris paribus. In order to figure out the relationship between guns and homicide, it is necessary to look at more data, at a more granular level, and in a more systematic and scientific way.

On top of that, the hard facts are that the bulk of the crime drop occurred in the 90s, at the same time that gun ownership rates also dropped significantly. In the 2000s the drop in violent crime slowed and in some cases leveled off. So even the very coarse data doesn't support your case.

There is ample statistical evidence about this topic, which I pointed you to last time you parroted this NRA talking point. What you did, predictably, is run and hide. Whether this is because you are actually not capable of thinking beyond bumper stickers, or because you actually are smart enough to realize that the argument you are making falls apart upon the slightest amount of scrutiny, that I'm not sure of.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1081321

This paper examines the relationship between gun ownership and
crime. Previous research has suffered from a lack of reliable data on
gun ownership. I exploit a unique data set to reliably estimate annual
rates of gun ownership at both the state and the county levels during
the past two decades. My findings demonstrate that changes in gun
ownership are significantly positively related to changes in the homicide rate, with this relationship driven almost entirely by an impact
of gun ownership on murders in which a gun is used. The effect of
gun ownership on all other crime categories is much less marked.
Recent reductions in the fraction of households owning a gun can
explain one-third of the differential decline in gun homicides relative
to nongun homicides since 1993.

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dranove/htm/dranove/coursepages/Mgmt%20469/guns.pdf

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates,
and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy
for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using
county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun
prevalence as between +0.1 and + 0.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates.
Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun
ownership is in the range $100 to $1800.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf

That said, for the large majority of
households, having a gun in the home
will not provide either health benefits or
costs this year. However, for those households where having a gun or not will matter this year, the evidence indicates that
the costs will widely outweigh the benefits. The benefit–cost ratio is especially
adverse for women and children in the
household. Indeed, after weighing the scientific evidence, the American Academy
of Pediatrics (AAP) decided that guns do
not belong in households with children:
The AAP recommends that pediatricians incorporate questions about
guns into their patient history taking and urge parents who possess
guns to remove them, especially
handguns, from the home.

http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20of%20a%20Gun%20in%20the%20Home%202011.pdf

Beyond that, there are the international comparisons, which you chose to ignore, but which are nevertheless important datapoints. Like I said, the US has far looser gun laws and far more gun violence than any other wealthy nation? Do you think that's just a coincidence?

Positive correlations were obtained between the rates of household gun
ownership and the national rates of homicide and suicide as well as the proportions of
homicides and suicides committed with a gun. There was no negative correlation
between the rates of ownership and the rates of homicide and suicide committed by
other means; this indicated that the other means were not used to "compensate" for the
absence of guns in countries with a lower rate of gun ownership.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/pdf/cmaj00266-0071.pdf