First of all the data does not support the proposition that existence of guns in our society is the root of gun violence. Given the number of guns in our nation, well over 350 million, the amount of gun violence does not support the contention that the existence of guns is the problem, the causality rate is too low.
Further the assertion that gun violence exceeds the defensive use is not supported by the data. A CDC funded study on the defensive use of firearm reported that guns were used defensively between 250,000 and 2.5 million times a year. A number that greatly exceeds gun deaths annually..
Both of these points are ridiculously and obviously false.
For the first point, it is literally impossible to have gun violence without guns. Guns are definitionally a root cause of gun violence. Now if you want to make the point that guns aren't the root of overall violence, that's fine. There is plenty of violence that has no relationship with gun prevalence. However, there is overwhelming data and statistical analyses showing the presence of a firearm is going to increase the severity and lethality of gun violence. There is a reason that a gun in the home doubles the risk of homicide, and triples the risk of suicide: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24592495/. And this study is just one of more than 130 that directly find that increased gun availability results in more violence (at least). The number of studies that find increased gun availability results in less violence: 3. When looking at gun laws, the numbers are 248 to 32, with most of that 32 coming from the notorious fraud John Lott and his colleagues. And the divergence in these numbers has definitely grown since 2023 when I analyzed our study database.
On the second point, we wrote a 12 part series debunking this lie. The CDC funded study you reference was not a study, but a review of existing literature. And the person who wrote the defensive gun use section was Gary Kleck, who quoted his own work, and his section was left in as he had veto power over the report, despite objections from many of the other experts involved: https://armedwithreason.substack.com/p/the-defensive-gun-use-lie-and-the-3a0
First of all the data does not support the proposition that existence of guns in our society is the root of gun violence. Given the number of guns in our nation, well over 350 million, the amount of gun violence does not support the contention that the existence of guns is the problem, the causality rate is too low.
Further the assertion that gun violence exceeds the defensive use is not supported by the data. A CDC funded study on the defensive use of firearm reported that guns were used defensively between 250,000 and 2.5 million times a year. A number that greatly exceeds gun deaths annually..
Both of these points are ridiculously and obviously false.
For the first point, it is literally impossible to have gun violence without guns. Guns are definitionally a root cause of gun violence. Now if you want to make the point that guns aren't the root of overall violence, that's fine. There is plenty of violence that has no relationship with gun prevalence. However, there is overwhelming data and statistical analyses showing the presence of a firearm is going to increase the severity and lethality of gun violence. There is a reason that a gun in the home doubles the risk of homicide, and triples the risk of suicide: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24592495/. And this study is just one of more than 130 that directly find that increased gun availability results in more violence (at least). The number of studies that find increased gun availability results in less violence: 3. When looking at gun laws, the numbers are 248 to 32, with most of that 32 coming from the notorious fraud John Lott and his colleagues. And the divergence in these numbers has definitely grown since 2023 when I analyzed our study database.
On the second point, we wrote a 12 part series debunking this lie. The CDC funded study you reference was not a study, but a review of existing literature. And the person who wrote the defensive gun use section was Gary Kleck, who quoted his own work, and his section was left in as he had veto power over the report, despite objections from many of the other experts involved: https://armedwithreason.substack.com/p/the-defensive-gun-use-lie-and-the-3a0