Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Norway has pretty strict gun control laws in place, more strict than even those proposed by the Dems right now, yet a gunman managed to kill 77 people in a mass shooting there.
The idea that gun control will prevent such things is a myth.
The idea that gun control will prevent such things is a myth.
"Prevent" as in 100% guarantee? Sure, it won't do so. Mitigate and lower the rate of?
So kinda like allowing conceal carry?
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Well, I'm guessing Norway's per capita "death by gun" rate is still far lower than ours.
Huh... 1.78 (Norway) versus 10.2 (United States). Who would have thunk it?
Huh... 1.78 (Norway) versus 10.2 (United States). Who would have thunk it?
Conflating two things. Obviously if you have more strict gun controls, you'll have lower "gun violence" or even "deaths by gun". But that's circular. The question is whether actual overall crime/violence/murder rates are lower because of gun control and there's very close to zero evidence that one affects the other. But we were talking about mass shooting events, and how to prevent them. Clearly we can't prevent them via gun control, so why not allow legal changes (like more concealed carry and removing gun free zones around schools) which would mitigate and lower the rate of such shootings?
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To be more exact, in the US, the gun-related homicide rate is 3.7 people per 100k. In Norway it's 0.04 people per 100k.
Sure. So what? When guns are available, people who want to kill someone else will choose to use a gun. If they aren't, they'll use other means. The overall homicide rate in Norway is .6, while it's 4.8 in the US. So in the US, 77% of all homicides are committed via firearm, while in Norway only 6.6% are. But put another way, the ratio of homicides committed with something other than a firearm is much higher in Norway than in the US, right? That strongly suggests that when guns aren't available, people still try to commit crimes (and murders). They just use other tools to do so.
It tells us nothing about what the overall murder rate would be in Norway if they changed their gun control laws to be exactly like in the US. Perhaps then, we'd see .45 gun-related homicides per 100k out of .6 total homicides out of 100k. All you may change is how the murders are committed, not whether they are. There's no strong evidence that simply having guns more available makes people commit more murders than otherwise. The evidence seems to suggests merely an effect on the choice of weapons.
The US has a higher overall murder rate. There are a host of sociological and geographical reasons for that. Assuming it's "because we have more guns" is quite a stretch, but that's more or less the argument you're trying to use. I think it's a flawed one. I think we need to look at how legal changes in the US might change things in the US and not assume that if we changed our laws to be like <insert European nation here>, it'll magically make our overall crime and murder rates go down.