A Report From Obama’s “Humane” Drug War

[mrstickball]

SamuelRSmith said:

Rath said:

SamuelRSmith said:

Rath said:
America has a ridiculous amount of gun crime, homicides using guns and accidental gun deaths. Freely available guns have not made America a safer place.

But, are the guns the cause of the violence, or something else? It seems the drug war and socioeconomic backgrounds that have more influence.

For example, New Hampshire has a murder rate of roughly 1.0 out of 100,000... which outperforms many European countries. New Hampshire also has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the country (http://freestateproject.org/intro/gun_rights)...

 

I'm not saying freedom to own guns is the cause of the problem - I'm saying that in combination with other factors (such as the drug war and crime) weak gun laws make the problem worse. Louisiana is an example of a state with weak gun laws, socioeconomic problems and a huge gun crime rate.

Ah, okay.

I think the best approach is to deal with the socioeconomic problems, rather than bans guns. The banning of guns won't do anything.

Correct.

Every gun ban in the US has done nothing to prevent crime. Our real problems are much deeper and can't simply be wished away through banning gun ownership.

If you do study on crime in the US, our murder rate per capita was much, much lower before the 1960s. Well within European standards of 1.5 murders per 100,000 people. Since then, our crime rate skyrocketed from that 1.5 to about 6.0 by the 1980s.

If you look deeper into our issues, as well as global trends in regards to crime, you find a lot of other more compelling arguments that correlate to crime:

• Economic inequality
• Education
• Mixed cultures

And so on. America is a mess not because of firearms, but in spite of it.

Our problems really started and ended with the baby boom in 1948 through 1972. Birth rates skyrocketed, and 18 years later, our crime began to spike throughout the 60s and 70s. Given the background behind why that happened, there are bigger reasons for the crime. Go watch Freakanomics for some pretty interesting analysis of crime in the US. I tend to agree strongly with their findings, despite my pro-life leanings (hint: abortions solved the crime problems more than gun banning ever did).