The murder rate on U.S. islands with strict gun laws

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December 5, 2015 9:32 am Robert Zimmerman

A comparison of the murder rate on U.S. islands that have very strict gun control laws with the average U.S. murder rate finds that gun control has no effect on reducing violence, and in fact might help increase it.

The article finds that the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have far more murders per person than the U.S., while Hawaii has less. The research does demonstrate, however, that the argument used by places like Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC (that the access to guns in nearby communities causes their gun laws to fail) is bogus. It doesn’t matter if guns are available nearby, as shown above. Instead, as the author correctly notes,

A major problem with trying to lower murder rates with gun laws aimed at restricting the entire population’s access to firearms is that only a tiny number of guns are needed to supply those involved in violent crime. From an economic perspective, it does not matter much if you attempt to fill a bucket from a small pond or an ocean; filling the bucket is easy in either case.

3 comments

hondo

December 5, 2015 at 2:53 pm

Thanks Bob for referencing Dean Weingarten – he does great work in the cause of the 2nd Amendment.

Homicide is a cultural thing – the tools are irrelevant (especially to the victim).
CVA

December 6, 2015 at 8:16 am

Hondo, rather…homicide is lack of culture thing?
Cotour

December 6, 2015 at 5:18 pm

I think the take away from this article and the statistics it sites again points to the glaring difference between the locations with the highest murders per 100K people and the lowest, CULTURE. Should Americans settle and surrender their freedoms for an invasion of garbage culture where human life is worth much less? Low standards is no standards, and who wants to live in a hybrid garbage culture?

This article from Salon makes the argument that the metric should be safety and not freedom and to finally jettison the old and inapplicable to modern existence second amendment.

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/04/the_second_amendment_must_go_we_ban_lawn_darts_its_time_to_ban_guns/

He proposes to cast aside the master design and change the Constitution 1. because it is changeable and 2. he proposes to surrender freedom for “safety” and of course he begins his piece citing how many children are killed in accidents in their cribs. I get the correlation between death caused by an accident or poor design of a crib / product and passing law to mitigate it, but his real story logic leverage was that he was able to work the death of children and “protecting” them (ala Bill Clinton) into his piece and equate changing the second amendment with it. Thats is a big set up fail for me, comparing apples and bananas. Too bad all tyranny was not perpetrated with the use of cribs, then his point would have had more sustainable weight.

*A man walks into a bank and announces “this is a stick up” as he cocks the crib he dragged into the bank with him.

*Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries climb down from the mountains of Cuba dragging their cribs through the streets of Havana to take control from Batista.

See , it really does not work that well.

The murder rate on U.S. islands with strict gun laws

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