San Francisco: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

[renodoc]

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Who cares, Even Mayor Gavin Newsom, a strong supporter of gun control, said, the ban "clearly will be thrown out [in court]... It's really just a public opinion poll at the end of the day."

The whole thing was a colossal waste of space.

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You forgot waste of time and money.

But it does speak to the film actors guild mentality of the city dwellars. Duh.

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But it does speak to the film actors guild mentality of the city dwellars. Duh.

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Best. Observation. Of. The. Day. !!!!!!!!!

[Borodog]

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You said you didn't care.

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No I didn't. I just said the debate doesn't interest me very much. My only concern was that you seemed to be telling everyone 'how it is' but didn't provide any info. to back it up.

Anyway, I'm not going to go browising around some site for information you claimed you already knew, etc. If you can point to it, that would be great.

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Ok. Where to start. First, forgive the delay, it was late last night when we were conversing and I wasn't really in the mood to write a long treatise. Second, notice that I edited my post to correct what I had originally said. I originally said there was no correlation between gun bans and gun violence, which is incorrect. What I had in my head was the fact that their is no correlation between gun supply and gun violence. I confused the two (it was late) and came up with the hybrid, incorrect statement. There is a tremendous amount of information in the Reason article already posted, and I'm not going to rehash it.

What we can say confidently is that firearm ownership shows no correlation with violent deaths. From
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvintl.html#intl :

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Is Gun Ownership Correlated with Violent Deaths?

In 1993 a Swiss professor, Martin Killias, published a study of 18 countries concerning gun ownership, homicide and suicide. He in part concluded there was a weak correlation between total homicide and gun ownership. For a partial criticism of his study see Dunblane Misled where using the countries studied by Killias, these researchers found a much stronger correlation between firearm homicides and car ownership. More seriously, when the United States was included in the Killias study, a stronger correlation between total homicide and gun ownership was found. When two countries were excluded, the U.S. (high gun ownership, high murder rate) and Northern Ireland (low gun ownership, high murder rate) the correlation was marginally significant. Gary Kleck writes, "Contrary to his claim that 'the overall correlation is not contingent upon a few countries with extreme scores on the dependent and independent variable', reanalysis of the data reveals that if one excludes only the United States from the sample there is no significant association between gun ownership and the total homicide rate." (Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, p 253. Walter de Gruyter, Inc. New York, 1997.) Kleck concludes that "the homicide-guns study was not international at all, but merely reflected the unique status of the United States as a high-gun ownership/high-violence nation...Since the positive association Killias observed was entirely dependent on the U.S. case, where self-defense is a common reason for gun ownership, this supports the conclusion that the association was attributable to the impact of the homicide rates on gun levels."

Using homicide and suicide data from a larger sample of countries, 35, (International Journal of Epidemiology 1998:27:216), Kleck found "no significant (at the 5% level) association between gun ownership levels and the total homicide rate in the largest sample of nations available to study this topic. (Associations with the total suicide rate were even weaker.)" (Targeting Guns, p 254.)

A more recent study, by Killias, concludes "no significant correlations with toal suicide or homicide rates were found, leaving open the question of possible substitution effects."

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Furthermore, international violent crime rate comparisons are complicated. Some cultures are just more violent than others, regardless of gun supply ( http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvinco.html ):

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Arbitrary Comparisons Between Countries

The U.S. has a high gun murder rate, whereas a country like England with strict gun controls has almost no gun murders and a very low murder rate. Doesn't this show that gun control is effective in reducing murder rates? Not exactly. Prior to having any gun controls, England already had a homicide rate much lower than the United States (Guns, Murders, and the Constitution: A Realistic Assessment of Gun Control, Don B. Kates Jr.). Japan is another country typically cited (see Japanese Gun Control, by David B. Kopel). (Briefly discussing the difference in homicide rates between England and the U.S. is Clayton Cramer's, Variations in California Murder Rates: Does Gun Availability Cause High Murder Rates?)

Gun control opponents can play similar games. The Swiss with 7 million people have hundreds of thousands of fully-automatic rifles in their homes (see GunCite's "Swiss Gun Laws") and the Israelis, until recently, have had easy access to guns (brief summary of Israeli firearms regulations here). Both countries have low homicide rates. Likewise this doesn't mean more guns less crime.

The U.S. has a higher non-gun murder rate than many European country's total murder rates. On the other hand, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Mexico have non-gun murder rates in excess of our total murder rate.

Incidentally in 13th century Europe, several studies have estimated homicide rates in major cities to be around 60 per 100,000. (Even back then, the equivalent of coroners, kept records.)

There are many, many factors, some much more prominent than gun availability that influence homicide rates and crime in general. (See this excerpt from 1997 FBI Uniform Crime Report and GunCite's "Is Gun Ownership Correlated with Violent Deaths?")

Due to the many confounding factors that arise when attempting international comparisons, this approach would appear to hold little promise for determining the influence of gun levels (or handgun availability) on violence rates.

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And if this isn't proof that gun supply has no effect on firearms deaths, I don't know what you would accept ( http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvsupp.html ):



By the way, I used to be pro-gun control. I had a fear of guns (not a phobia, but I disliked them). I debated a guy on the internet about it maybe 5 years ago. He won. Owning a gun is like having home-owner's insurance. You hope you never need it, but it's just silly not to have. The same thing goes for carrying a sidearm. I routinely carry a firearm in my car. Not because I believe it's likely that I'll ever have to use it, or that I want to use it. But it's just stupid not to have.

A gun is like a condom. I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[lehighguy]

pwned

[renodoc]

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pwned

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Now I finally understand what this means... thanks. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Jdanz]

criminals are gonna flock there? yeah cause any criminal outside of San Fran is really keeping up on his municipal ordinances.

[thatpfunk]

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Do you guys really think rape at gunpoint is a frequent occurance? I'd love to see some statistics that say it is. Also, the hysteria over "criminals flocking to San Franscisco" is just ridiculous. The vast majority of "crime" is local crime of opportunity---why do you think East St. Louis is such a hellhole, when its denizens could drive five miles to one of the nice neighboorhoods in the country and rob the inhabitants?


Also, a fun little fact that gets lost in the random distribution of statistics--if indeed, they are from reputable sources (highly debatable): correlation isn't causation.

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thank god someone said it.

[hmkpoker]

Isn't a firearms ban blatantly unconstitutional?

(And if you use the argument that our founding fathers didn't know what kind of technology we'd have hundreds of years later, then shouldn't all citizens at least have the right to black powder weapons?)

[The once and future king]

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Except for murder and rape, it admitted, "Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes."

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Ill take that trade. Also how does America compare against a range of countries with Gun control, such as Germany, Japan etc?

[The Don]

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If the people of Texas can vote to ban gay marriage, why shouldn't the people of San Francisco be allowed to vote on a Firearms ban...

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Those who truly believe in individual freedom oppose both of these restrictions.