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

[DanTex]

197. I meant increase relative to UK, Germany, France, etc.

The ATF disclaimer on page two is worth reading

Yes, but the data I presented wasn't from the ATF, but from Canadian authorities.

The ultimate test is the before and after, can it be verified by experimentation. Can't find a case of murder or suicide rate dropping due to stricter gun laws.

There is no single "ultimate" test. The ultimate test is the totality of the evidence. Also, nothing can be really be verified by experimentation -- to really perform a controlled experiment, you'd have to create two separate worlds, and change the law in one world but not the other. Policy analysis is always messy in this way.

If you're looking for homicide rate dropping after gun control, one obvious example is the Brady Bill, which got passed right before the massive crime drop of the 90s. And there are other examples (e.g. Hawaii, Australia). Of course, that doesn't establish causality, it could just have been a coincidence -- I don't think anyone believes the Brady Bill is responsible for all or even most of the drop in crime that occurred in the years after it was passed. That's one problem with before/after: since it's just one datapoint, it's hard to claim statistical significance.

Another problem with the before/after thing is that most changes in gun policy in the last 50 or so years have been incremental, which means that whatever effects are likely to be masked by other trends, like with the Brady Bill. And then there is the fact that the effects of policy changes can take a long time to kick in.

I prefer to look at all the evidence and then pick the most likely explanation.