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So I'm not totally sold on the gun ownership increase thing. While the number of guns per person has been increasing dramatically, the % of households with guns has been pretty steady. I don't think more people have access to guns, it's just that people with gun have more now.
looking back to 1991, I think that's when the NRA really started with the gun-nut-type "President XYZ is coming to take your guns" stuff that drove sales among the crazies.
if gun ownership was widespread, and tied to high-crime areas that saw declines in crime over that time period, you could make the case, but there needs to be some evidence that gun sales aren't concentrated among a certain (stupid) percentage of the population, and the increase in ownership occurs in every jurisdiction that witnessed a drop in crime over this time period. And I suspect this is impossible, unless you can argue with a straight face that all those hipsters that gentrified Brooklyn were packing heat, and rented their lofts at gunpoint, defended their artisanal craft brewing pubs with hot lead, etc.
to the contrary:
there are studies that show a strong correlation with increased gun ownership and (surprise, surprise)
more gun violence (
link).
WaPo article stating that the only thing pro-gun studies show is that allowing concealed carry doesn't increase crime. Tying it to a reduction in crime is
arguable at best,
completely wrong at worst (though those adjectives depend on your point of view).
cited in the WaPo article,
John Donohue argues against the premise that gun widespread gun ownership deters crime:
Americans own 270 million of the more than 600 million guns in private hands worldwide, he said.
The United States has far more homicides each year than other countries within the top 25 most affluent nations worldwide, Donohue said.
Those liberal propagandists at Fox News published
this story citing increased gun ownership and a three-fold increase of suicides and a two-fold increase in gun-committed homicides:
Anglemyer and his colleagues write that previous studies have suggested rates of suicide and murder may be higher in areas with a high prevalence of gun ownership because people who commit those acts on impulse have an easier time getting a gun there.
duh... you think?
An objective survey of the facts would seem to support the conclusion that crime rates have been declining since roughly 1990 for a variety of factors, mainly socio-economic (perhaps the reduction of lead poisoning?
link,
link), and gun ownership, while it may have contributed to some portion of the decline, or not, can be proven to increase the risk of gun violence within the greater trend of declines in crime, and therefore itself should be reduced, since it represents a particular risk to innocent people by making murders, suicides, mass-shootings, etc. easier to commit.