Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Gun Control: For or Against It?

Driving the other day, I was behind a guy (I assume, it was a GIANT 4x4 with hunting bumper stickers on it) who had a bumper sticker about gun control:

Gun control is using two hands

Gun control is a strange concept to me, not that we should let just anyone own a gun, but it's not the guns that kill people, it's the bullets. And the only way bullets get into, and out of, guns is by people loading and unloading them.

 


So, either control people through legislation (if you use a gun in a crime, get X years added onto your sentence), or control the disposition of bullets. It used to be, at least in California, that whenever you purchased handgun ammunition, you had to show ID and your information was recorded. I'm sure that law went down the tubes due to some dumbass concerned about "privacy" (meanwhile all of our privacy has gone out the freakin' window. Google FISA. Or Tim Ferriss.) 

 

Here's a blog post by Freakonomics author, Steven D. Levitt. In a nutshell, there is no evidence that banning guns, as has been done in San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington DC (recently turned back by the US Supreme Court), has any effectiveness whatsoever.




It's always great to be able to point to facts and evidence to arrive at a conclusion. The conclusion here is that banning guns has no effect on crime.


2 comments:

Aaron R. Hymas said...

Thanks for your opinion on gun control. It is interesting to me that people continue to think that banning guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens will help curb violent crime. This goes against all of the statistics that are out there that completely debunk that theory.

Great post!

xarhymas
http://debatingtheissuesblog.blogspot.com
http://www.debatingtheissues.co.nr

billspaced said...

Thanks for your comments and support. I appreciate it. It kills me when people argue for or against something without thinking about the root cause of the issue. It's not that folks have guns. Canada has more guns per capita and their crime rate is way lower than the US.

What does that tell you? Not much. Just like most statistics.

However, the stats should support the assertion. And in this case, the stats are silent.