Is there anything you'd be willing to fight a war for?

[David Horn]

(10-21-2022, 03:50 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(10-20-2022, 06:04 PM)David Horn Wrote: You do realize that the gun lobby, especially the faction that represents the gun industry itself, successfully lobbied to keep the collection and retention of data on gun-related adccidents, suicides and homocides illegal in most places and aggregated data illegal at the national level.  That's why the CDC -- by law -- can't study the subject.  So your counter argument rings massively hollow.  Just as a single point: gun-related crimes in New Zealand and Switzerland are low because ownership requires a license and each weapon is registered.  Resales are formal and documented, just like the transfer of a automobile.  The unfit are weeded out and the others are fully tracked.  You OK with that?

When did this happen (asking out of genuine curiosity, I want to look it up). In either event, Thomas Sowell addresses much of the data we do have available (often going back over 200 years), and refutes some of the more commonly cited studies. For example, people often make hasty comparisons between the US and places like the UK or Australia, when New York had over 5x the murder rate of London as early as 200 years ago (ie, before either country had modern notions of gun laws).

The official ban was enacted in 1996, but the de facto ban is much older.  The original problem: the inability to acquire reliable data; the cause: the gun industry, among others, making data collection a local issue (sound familiar -- it's a common method to kill things).  So even in the 1950s, data in NYC would be quite good, data in Poughkeepsie, not so much. The South and the mid/mountain West were and remain data wastelands to this day.  Several members of the old forum (I'm one of them) tried to tear into John Lott's "research" when he published his famous tome: More Guns, Less Crime, was 99% conjecture.  In short, the "data" made any conclusion equally valid., because there was so little and they were of exceedingly poor quality (anecdotes more than data).  Actually doing real data analysis is impossible.