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irstupid said:
And how were those countries selected? Guising to prove someone point, they selected the countries with the lowest school shootings. |
The article doesn't specify why those countries were selected, but the most probable reasons are:
1. Those countries represent different places around the world (Argentina and Brazil from South America; Australia from Oceania; Azerbaijan from the Caucasus; Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Russia and Scotland from different regions of Europe; Canada and US from North America; China, India, Israel, Japan, North Korea and Thailand from different regions of Asia; Guatemala from mainland Central America; Trinidad and Tobago from the Caribbean; Kenya, South Africa and Swaziland from different parts of Africa). All continents and regions are represented.
2. Those countries are big in population (I mean, 3.8 billion is basically half of the world's population) and relevant enough so they have data of school killings from 2000 to 2010. Analyzing countries such as Andorra or Vanuatu wouldn't make much sense since they have too few inhabitants.
| irstupid said: But look at a few posts before yours at the big write up. You can see that the average number of murders per year has increased in the UK as gun laws became more and more strict. Does correlation equal causation? If you guys are going to use that method, then I will. |
We have to better analyze the facts:
1. That huge spike in 2002/2003 happened because of the uncovering of Dr. Harold Shipman's almost 200 victims, credited to those years even though they happened from 1975-1998. That's an anomaly and shouldn't be considered for the analysis of a society. Similar anomalies happened in the years of 2001 (58 Chinese nationals who suffocated in a lorry going to the UK), 2004 (21 dead in the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster) and 2006 (52 victims from the 7/7).
2. The homicide rates were already increasing steadily decades before the gun ban in 97.
3. The spike happened years after the ban. In http://www.firearmsafetyseminar.org.nz/_documents/Greenwood_Paper.pdf">The British Handgun Ban Logic, Politics, and Effect, Colin Greenwood claims that "The whole process of confiscating virtually all legally held handguns took place between July 1997 and February 1998." But for 1998, 1999 and 2000 the rates stayed basically the same. The spike in 2001 seems to be completely normal, as it also happened a few times before, even without the gun control laws.
4. There were too few handguns for it to make any difference. In 1997, the population of the UK was of about 51 million people. 57,000 people handed in guns after the handgun prohibition. That means that 1.1% of the population had all the handguns in the UK. That's basically nothing.
5. The law actually made a difference in the percentage of homicides committed using firearms. While we don't have any data for 1997, in 2009 the percentage in the UK was of 6.6%, according to UNODOC's Homicides by firearm document. In the US, in 2010, that percentage is of 67.5%.
Last edited by Lucca - on 05 April 2018
