There's a rigid divide on how to solve this topic that seems to stem from a complete lack of ability to address the US relationship with guns from first principles, thanks to the second amendment.
I don't read about people laying out a series of goals, and then scoring them. Perhaps freedom from action movie amounts of gun violence, protection from government tyranny, guns are cool get your hands off you wouldn't be okay with the gov taking your beautiful guitars away.
Guns vs other weapons... I suspect that having lots of guns available increases homicide rates. Chicago had 695 homicides in 2022 city-wide according to the chicago police (https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/CompStat-Public-2022-Year-End-1.pdf), and Toronto had something around 90. These are all homicides. But anecdotally, Toronto is seeing an increase in homicides as we hear more and more about gun violence becoming more common. I feel pretty comfortable saying that guns increase homicides, but I don't have all the smoking guns (ha) to show it perfectly.
It's weird to see people arguing that a 10x higher per-capita homicide rate (Chicago and Toronto are very similar, chicago is more densely populated) can't have anything to do with guns. Or at least debunking any attempts at saying maybe the way the US does guns has something to do with it. But also, I haven't seen HWFO lying about statistics when they take apart aspects of the gun violence debate. It feels like they're doing easy takedowns of bad anti-gun activism, but again, hard to show.
Poverty, a really mean culture and lots of guns are probably the cause of these things. Fix medical bankruptcies and predatory anti-poor practices and maybe it will improve, until the flogging continues.
There's a rigid divide on how to solve this topic that seems to stem from a complete lack of ability to address the US relationship with guns from first principles, thanks to the second amendment.
I don't read about people laying out a series of goals, and then scoring them. Perhaps freedom from action movie amounts of gun violence, protection from government tyranny, guns are cool get your hands off you wouldn't be okay with the gov taking your beautiful guitars away.
Guns vs other weapons... I suspect that having lots of guns available increases homicide rates. Chicago had 695 homicides in 2022 city-wide according to the chicago police (https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/CompStat-Public-2022-Year-End-1.pdf), and Toronto had something around 90. These are all homicides. But anecdotally, Toronto is seeing an increase in homicides as we hear more and more about gun violence becoming more common. I feel pretty comfortable saying that guns increase homicides, but I don't have all the smoking guns (ha) to show it perfectly.
The gun-apologetics I find in some people like Handwaving Freakoutery (recent article about concealed carry https://hwfo.substack.com/p/debunking-the-cap-fact-sheet?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=257285&post_id=125062550&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email). I'm using GPT to summarize this because it's quite lengthy, but I've skimmed, and the general vibe is similar to other interactions I've had with HWFO folks on guns.
It's weird to see people arguing that a 10x higher per-capita homicide rate (Chicago and Toronto are very similar, chicago is more densely populated) can't have anything to do with guns. Or at least debunking any attempts at saying maybe the way the US does guns has something to do with it. But also, I haven't seen HWFO lying about statistics when they take apart aspects of the gun violence debate. It feels like they're doing easy takedowns of bad anti-gun activism, but again, hard to show.
Poverty, a really mean culture and lots of guns are probably the cause of these things. Fix medical bankruptcies and predatory anti-poor practices and maybe it will improve, until the flogging continues.