Who would YOU call if you were a victim of a crime, dearheart?Wayne LaPierre doesn't want to hear about this study......because the conclusions are a no-brainer..... more guns, more crime.
what about the remaining 20,000 gun-related deaths each year? should I take it that you don't give a shit about those people either?
Ms. Jules,
How about the 10,000+ deaths due to impaired driving. Should we register all vehicles? That'll stop it alright. lol.
Yeah, but crime has been going down, down, down. If it ain't guns then the reason is that criminals have be incarcerated. Apparently we imprison more than any other country.
Although gun laws have loosened, the share of Americans owning guns has fallen. That's the relevant consideration in testing whether less guns means less crime.
No. The stats absolutely do not support that. Incarceration rates really started to take off in the early 1980s, as a result of Reagan's war on recreational drug users. If climbing incarceration rates were associated with falling crime, then we'd expect the period between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s to be one of dramatic declines in crime. In fact, most of that period was a time of rapid increases in crime. In 1991, the US hit the highest violent crime rate in its entire history. By comparison, in recent years, incarceration rates have fallen, even as violent crime has declined substantially.
Incarcerations rates go up and crimes go down. They even intersect. If the criminal element is in jail crimes aren't committed. You can't talk your way out of basic facts.No. The stats absolutely do not support that. Incarceration rates really started to take off in the early 1980s, as a result of Reagan's war on recreational drug users. If climbing incarceration rates were associated with falling crime, then we'd expect the period between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s to be one of dramatic declines in crime. In fact, most of that period was a time of rapid increases in crime. In 1991, the US hit the highest violent crime rate in its entire history. By comparison, in recent years, incarceration rates have fallen, even as violent crime has declined substantially.
I see no correlation between the two:
How do you know? Gun registrations? Surveys? lol.
I don't believe that. I know that several folks have claimed that more guns are being purchased by a smaller number of people, but my experience contradicts that. I simply don't buy that.
Actually, crimes are committed in jails and prisons all the time. The most recent data I have was for 2002, when 68 prison and jail inmates were murdered. And that doesn't count however many guards and other staff they may have murdered. That's a murder rate of about 3.37 per 100k, plus however many non-prisoners they murdered. But the key consideration isn't just whether those people are committing crimes while in prison, but rather what impact their imprisonment has on crime overall. For example, if you lock up a non-violent drug user and he spends five years around hardened, violent criminals, and he gets out, is he more likely to commit crimes once he's out? And if, by locking him up, you left his son without a father figure and he ran wild on the streets, is he more likely to commit crimes than if his Dad had instead gone into an addiction treatment program and rehab program for a few months? If you look at the data, with incarceration rates and crime rates soaring at the same time, and if you look at the US data versus data in other leading countries (with much lower incarceration rates and much lower serious violent crime rates), it starts to look pretty plausible that our system of mass incarceration was helping to drive our serious problem with criminality, and that the decline in incarceration in recent years may help to get that crime problem under control.
Surveys. You are, of course, free to lie to pollsters. But the same has always been true, so unless there's a reason to think gun owners are more mendacious, as a group, than gun owners of the past, the decline in the percentage of poll respondents who tell pollsters they have a gun in the household is likely to be a result of an actual decline in the number of households with a gun.
Consider that the circle of people you know may be atypical. The survey data shows a 4-decade decline:
Dude, very, very, very, few gun owners I know would admit to owning any firearms to some stranger on the phone. I know guys who are long time moderators on message boards for gun owners who still maintain they lost all their guns in a freak boating accident.... we don't trust the people who take the polls. We don't trust the people who take the surveys. We know the people who want this info are liars, or simpletons, and we act accordingly.
