Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9823171:


Isdaril

33
Armed to immobilize 11 10, 6:00pm

@comrade_Comrade "There is an obvious correlation: spree killers reliably pick gun free zones and there was a number (admittedly small, but hey - gun free zones) of attempted mass shootings in US that were stopped by armed civilians."
This isn't really correlation though, this is just you finding a convenient example to prove your belief. But even if this were true and gun-free zones had actually more crimes overall, this would prove nothing about how it would affect the entire country crime rate if it was entirely gun-free.
Your argument is to say that because people that can't defend themselves are preys to crimes and offenses, then if everybody would have such means then crime would not happen. But this reasoning is obviously flawed because it doesn't seem to apply in real life. The best proof being that while almost everybody in the US posess a gun, crimes are 3 times more likely to happen than in France where regular citizen seldom have such things.
Think of it that way : if you've got a robber in a room of 15 people. If one of those people is an aged one, then he is most likely to get robbed, but then even if the 15 people are aged, only one person will get robbed because the robber will most likely failed to flee if he tries to robb a second one, also maybe robbing one person is enough for him that day. This is an imperfect comparison, and it's probably way more complex than that. But it seems crime does behave more in a systemic way than in an opportunistic one. So think more of this question as such : "Has gun ownership an impact on that systemic crime rate or not ?". And the answer is not that easy to find out because as I said, USA is a country with a lot of crimes but also a high gun ownership (the highest of any country). But does that mean gun ownership has no impact (or even a negative one) or does that mean the crime rate would be higher if it were not for all those guns ? Hard to say, more so because what we can compare are very different countries in which the differences observed could come from almost anything else, an historic measure between the two variables in different countries would be interesting but I'm not sure gun ownership is that closely registered in any country so it's probably hard to find out too (finding out a correlation or an inverse one, could still be simpson's paradox at work, but at least we would have something tangible).

"Suicides and accidents happen anyway."
Sure they do (well actually, suicides often become suicide attempts when they don't involve a gun), but they are way less deadly if they do not involve guns. That is why deadly accidents and suicides are positively correlated with gun ownership.
Also it would be quite irrational to incriminate cars for it but not guns.