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It seems to me to still be a case of self-reassurance: the social issues, culture, demographics, relative disposalable income, population density, etc are sufficiently different to make a direct comparison of crime rates, taking gun rights as the main variable, as being an exercise in futility.
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Got to agree and restate something several have already mentioned. My Major and Masters degrees are both in Political Science. If you do any academic work in the whole "gun control" field, you are quickly trained that you can't easily compare one country to another. There are just too many differences. So academic work in this area tries to study one country at a time.
When this was all brought up on the CNN talk show, this is what the pro-gun person should have pointed out. Rather than comparing absolute numbers of murders, you have to look at the per capita ones. Even more importantly, you need to look at how those numbers have changed over time. If somebody wants to argue that British gun control is responsible for a lower number of murders there, they have to include what the numbers were like for the ten years before the gun control came into effect. If the numbers were the same before the law... how can they make a cause and effect argument?
The US is a very large and very diverse nation. And we vary a tremendous amount just within our own borders. I live in a very rural county in NE Oklahoma. I have my CCW and carry whenever I go out but the reality is that this county very, very rarely has a murder. We might go ten years or more between them. But Tulsa County has had 8 murders in the first 9 days of the year. (Not usually that bad. Average is only 49 a year. Half as many as OKC.)
Considering how we are and our history, IMO you could physically eliminate every gun by some kind of magic spell and our murder rate would perk along about the same. Drug dealers will fight and kill to protect their turf. So will gangs. Some people will continue to kill others over money or women. There ARE things we can do to moderate some of this violence but doing away with guns won't fix it. Especially if we don't have that magic spell and we can only get rid of the ones the law abiding own!
Gregg