Security and Gun Control - Part 3

My goal here is to present my opinions on gun control in a logical way that takes into account others' perspective. Today I will go through my the first item on my list of  assumptions from yesterday and reflect on it.

1. Guns lead to violence. Some people draw a very close association between violence and guns and conclude that the one is at least in part caused by the other.

There are certainly places where there is a lot of gun violence, and in those places it is not surprising that association could be drawn. I looked through a bunch of articles and this is inconclusive. There might be increased gun violence where there are more guns, but I couldn't find anything conclusive about overall violent crime in relation to gun ownership. There is this article which shows that overall violent crime has dropped in the past decades while gun ownership has significantly increased. That is an overall national statistic and there are a lot of other potential factors.

A further problem here is there is not any differentiation between legal and illegal gun ownership that I can tell. While it is logical that there could be more illegal guns the more legal guns there are that further muddies the topic.

An interesting statistic though, is that about 7% of non-fatal violent crimes involve a gun. Fatal gun incidents (murder) account for 2/3 of all murders though according to the FBI. That is a lot, but logically, if you are wanting to kill someone you will use the best tool available, which is generally a gun. Further murder accounts for only 1.2% of violent crimes. So gun involvement overall is very low.


In conclusion, I think this points to the fact that people are generally mean to each other and happen to use guns sometimes. Given 1 in 12 Americans have a felony and 18% of felonies are for violent offenses that works out to 1.5% of Americans are violent criminals. Given that small number and the overall small percentage of gun violence in proportion to all violence, increasing the legal possession and carry of guns should increase overall safety. I certainly do not get the impression that guns directly produce meaningfully more violence.