Harvard Study: Would Banning Guns Reduce Murder and Suicide? - Granite Grok

Harvard Study: Would Banning Guns Reduce Murder and Suicide?

Would_banning_firearms_reduce_murder_and_suicide?Gun Rights win

That is the title (link takes you to the 46 pg PDF) of a Harvard study that looked at violent crime, murder and suicide, in various nations, based on the prevalence of guns and gun owners.  As is typical of the white tower, researches who actually look at the data are surprised by the results.  There is no correlation and in fact, places where more citizens are legally able to own firearms have less murder and suicide.

Murder is murder. Where guns are prohibited or simply limited in availability, murderers not only kill by other means they do so more often, knowing they have a force advantage because the State has given it to them.  And people who want to kill themselves, they find a way.  Guns and gun ownership are not the driving factor for either.

This is just more evidence that the Democrat/progressive gun violence narrative machine is not just wrong but has it exactly backwards.  The more law abiding gun owners there are the lower the rates of crime, violent crime, murder, and suicide.  They will, perhaps at the very least, be happy to know that the false murder meme they’ve been repeating all these years, at least according to the Harvard study, was sourced to the Soviet Union propaganda machine.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the study to whet your appetite for your next exchange with another ignorant left0wing anti-gun shill. Emphasis mine.

International evidence and comparisons have long been offered as proof of the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths.  Unfortunately, such discussions are all too often been afflicted by misconceptions and factual error and focus on comparisons that are unrepresentative.  It may be useful to begin with a few examples.

There is a compound assertion that (a) guns are uniquely available in the United States compared with other modern developed nations, which is why (b) the United States has by far the highest murder rate.  Though these assertions have been endlessly repeated, statement (b) is, in fact, false and statement (a) is substantially so.  Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates.  Since well before that date, the Soviet Union possessed extremely stringent gun controls that were effectuated by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement.  So successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have firearms and very few murders involve them. Yet, manifest success in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the developed world.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the gun-less Soviet Union’s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those of gun?ridden America.  While American rates stabilized and then steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States.  Between 1998-2004 (the latest figure available for Russia), Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates.  Similar murder rates also characterize the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and various other now-independent European nations of the former U.S.S.R.  Thus, in the United States and the former Soviet Union transitioning into current-day Russia, “homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.”

While American gun ownership is quite high, Table 1 shows many other developed nations (e.g., Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Denmark) with high rates of gun ownership.  These countries, however, have murder rates as low or lower than many developed nations in which gun ownership is much rarer.  For example, Luxembourg, where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.

The same pattern appears when comparisons of violence to gun ownership are made within nations.  Indeed, “data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England,” like data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”

I’m still reading it but it is fascinating stuff; just not to the OFA clowns voting in NH and holding poorly attended, misnamed, anti-gun violence rally’s.

Here’s the link again; Would_banning_firearms_reduce_murder_and_suicide? Not necessarily new knowledge, certainly not surprising, but worth having when you need to inform low information voters who still believe much of the nonsense liberals repeat or when faced with one of the spittle machine liberal anti-gun establishment types in person.

Breitbart

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