http://www.nationalreview.com/node/427967/print Would Cracking Down on Guns in the U.S. Really Reduce Violence?
By Robert VerBruggen — December 3, 2015
The United States has a much higher homicide rate than just about any other highly developed country, and it also has much more civilian gun ownership. Further, within the U.S., the simplest analysis — the type journalists can do, using data that are readily available online — reveals tight correlations between states’ gun deaths and factors such as gun ownership and gun-control laws. The obvious conclusion seems to be: Get rid of the guns, get rid of the violence. It’s that simple, everyone knows it, and yet redneck conservatives in thrall to the NRA stubbornly resist handing over their weapons.
That’s a seductive line of reasoning — especially in the wake of horrifying, high-profile incidents such as the recent mass shootings in San Bernardino and Colorado Springs — but it’s false. In fact, the United States’ overall high rate of homicide is largely explained, perhaps entirely explained, by problems unrelated to gun ownership. There are policies concerning gun ownership that could reduce homicide, but the reductions would most likely be modest.
There is actually no simple correlation between states’ homicide rates and their gun-ownership rates or gun laws. This has been shown numerous times, by different people, using different data sets. A year ago, I took state gun-ownership levels reported by the Washington Post (based on a Centers for Disease Control survey) and compared them with murder rates from the FBI: no correlation. The legal scholar Eugene Volokh has compared states’ gun laws (as rated by the anti-gun Brady Campaign) with their murder rates: no correlation. David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner, a former National Review reporter, failed to find a correlation even between gun ownership in a state and gun murders specifically, an approach that sets aside the issue of whether gun availability has an effect on non-gun crime. (Guns can deter unarmed criminals, for instance, and criminals without guns may simply switch to other weapons.)
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