What the Harvard study finds is that those who claim more guns do equal more death cannot bear the burden of proof “because there simply is no large number of cases in which the widespread prevalence of guns among the general population has led to more murder.†And those same advocates cannot consistently show that “a reduction in the number of guns available to the general population has led to fewer deaths.†It appears that gun ownership is, in fact, irrelevant (or has little relevance) to a nation’s murder rate …
Read the whole thing. It’s always been a myth that gun ownership in Europe was relatively rare. Certainly rarer than here, but in most cases if you’re willing go jump through the hoops, guns in most of Europe are relatively legal and not entirely uncommon.
If you look at the history, gun control (in the modern sense that we understand it) in Europe only begins to take effect after the First World War – when govts of recuperating nations become scared of red revolutions like Russia’s.
Gun control in Europe was/is always about keeping arms out of the hands of the proles. It had nothing to do with crime. Crime was just the official cover story.
JFW
Of course, if you use numbers that do not reflect reality, you get results that do not reflect reality. I do not happen to have Poland’s 2002 murder rate here, but the official 2010 rate was 5.6 – not counting Roma and other minorities. From sources in Warsaw, Poznan, Krakow, and other cities it appears certain the overall murder rate is at least 8.1 per 100,000.
For comparison, in 2011 the FBI totaled 12,664 murders for a murder (NOT homicide) rate of 4.0. But if you did not count the 6329 black murder victims the US would have only about 6335 murders and a murder rate of 2.0. And law enforcement would be on every TV screen beating their chests and blaring “Looka wha’ we done!”
For the same reason, using the official fiction for the results of gun control legislation will produce some very strange results. The official numbers are produced by those with an interest in a low number. They make Bloomberg’s CompState appear downright honest.
Stranger