Dropping the violent crime and homicide rates by 50% over the span of two decades is a huge success. That's A LOT of lives saved.
Of course, it should be pointed out that the global trend for homicides and violent crime is pointing downwards all over the developed world, so attributing it all to more guns around doesn't seem to be a fair interpretation of the facts available. There are some facts that in my opinion make a causal link of major significance between guns around and violent crimes like the one you're implying less likely even if there seems to be some correlation. Let me point some of those out.
There are a lot of countries with a lot fewer guns around with much lower levels of homicide that are still posting declines. If you compare the US (a place with a lot of guns) to the properly developed European countries (places with much fewer guns), the correct global correlation seems to be "more guns, more violent crimes" as long as we're talking about the developed countries.
As you can see a lot of regions are experiencing a decline in homicide rates and most haven't done so by increasing gun ownership, so I think there is a lot of data contradicting your interpretation here.
I've highlighted the countries with high rates that are surely not as developed as the US and where crime and corruption are an expected part of the current political climate.
The countries the US should compare results with in my opinion are most of the countries on the left (with Estonia being an interesting outlier and something that genuinely surprised me, would read on it).
All of the red countries - certainly not in the same developmental bracket as the US. I wonder which countries are in the yellow (with level higher than the US with much fewer guns) and the green (lower levels, fewer guns). Yet more things to research.
If you intend to draw any conclusions then you should compare like to like.
apples to apples.
NOT...mice to elephants.
that being the case, In many ways it would be more accurate to compare american STATES to European countries..
Or perhaps cities.
also...if you remove the dhmikratic controlled cankers from the US data
such as Chicago, baltimore..etc.
then the US is the safest place on the planet..
that might be why there are so many people trying to get here.
This has turned out to be a super informative post about something I didn't really know that much about! Obviously this is a bit of a hot topic, and always will be.
You both make really good points.
"the US is the safest place on the planet.." ......ummm...aahhhh...yeah...thats a tough opinion to get on board with! haha....But yes, I do understand what you mean by if you remove Chicago and Baltimore (ridiculous violence, altho I had no idea Baltimore was that bad)
....but "that might be why there are so many people trying to get here." - THIS is a whole nother post in itself! Probably an interesting one as well.
I'm Canadian, so immigration and it's laws are also a great topic to debate! Touchy subject for a lot of people...but a great debate!
I'm glad you posted this article.
thank you
it has problems.
for one thing it's a multi-variable analysis.
is it guns?
or sugar?
really.
if some ingests too much sugar they get (bad things happen)..
then again...
is it guns...or TV
really...TV causes brain damage..
is it guns..
or..
what?
or all of it.
it's a HUGELY multivariable analysis.
and don't forget the monkeysphere.
touche. I probably wouldn't have thought of it in that way had you not just mentioned it. And guns are a subjective topic. Sugar, tv...those are objectively bad!
and a hundred, a thousand other things...
no way of telling what's the cause.
and what's the result.
You think so?! Please point me to the US cities with populations of 80 million (Germany), 65 million (France or the UK), 60 million (Italy) or 45 million (Spain) then. Oh, and those five countries' total population - roughly the same as the US. I hope this takes care of your sample size concern here...
Do you mean that there are factors that are way more important than gun proliferation like poverty, bad governance and so on? Then I agree completely.
You would have to cherrypick the hell out of the data for it to support that claim as the crime rate needs to drop down orders of magnitude, not just a bit for that to be true.
For people not from the most developed parts of the world, all of the developed countries including the US would be a significant improvement on safety. Other important reasons for people to be trying to get there are opportunity and liberty. For a lot of people it's really a place worth getting to.
I see you have reworded your comment a bit, but I still don't see you pointing out valid reasons to not draw the comparison. The first graph is GDP while crime rate is a function of population, so irrelevant. The second one compares small European countries to the largest US cities. You could do that with the largest European cities and small European countries, with the largest European cities and the smallest US states and you could do this with the largest US cities and the smallest US states. So again, in my humble opinion - irrelevant.
The population sample size of Western Europe is actually larger than the US, so the comparison should be valid. Additionally, the sample sizes don't actually need to be equal, they just both need to be representative for us to be able to compare them.
In my opinion, the data remains absolutely relevant.
Talking about the democrat/republican differentiation, I think you are still being more emotional than logical. Let's look at the 20 worst states in terms of violent crime.
It's not like there aren't any blue states in there, right?
OK.....it's irrelevant.
it's ALL irrelevant.
It's not ALL irrelevant, just the graphs you used as reasoning to throw a bunch of data out the window...