I am going to get to basically everything from comment 38 on down … to gun murders “crime without guns, or death without guns is somehow preferable” and why I think it’d be better if we were all limited to knifes (and the guns viewed through the lens of crime vs. protection). Also going to address the black market gun issue. Also the validity of the cross cultural study (which I had not heard of … my excuse is that I wasn’t that old in ’92.)

Shame so many are like him…

We could ban guns 100% across the globe, and the criminals would still have them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGVianQJsmQ

And we’d be unarmed to defend ourselves.

Are you suggesting, not with facts but supposition, that the chain of gun possession between manufacture and illegal use contains at least one theft of the weapon because 10% of guns used in crimes are stolen, and because another 40% of guns come from friends and family (and who knows how they acquired them?) When I say ‘not with facts but supposition’ I mean no disrespect, I just mean to clarify that I’m not missing a logical chain of equations but am instead hearing a theory posited about how gun possession chains function. It seems, as a theory to be reasonable enough.

Yes, I am using supposition to state that the chain from manufacture to crime includes a theft. From the FBI report we know automatically that 10% had a theft. Then there is another 40% from friend/family and an extra 30% from street/illegal source that may have been stolen in their past. I highly doubt that the friends and family of criminals (who by probability have a greater incidence of criminality themselves) bought their weapon from a legal source. Furthermore, I don’t think that a significant amount of the 300,000 to 600,000 guns stolen each year are used by Joe Blow for target shooting and hunting.

No, my gang won’t drive to Georgia to steal a firearm but my gang may have an agreement with a gang down their and drive down to purchase from them. The Georgia gang can obtain the weapons, sell them to the NY gang and not fear that the weapons might be used against them, because they have no territorial competition, being so far apart.

Then your gang is stupid, since when Granny Smith down the street goes out to do her shopping, you can easily break into her apartment and swipe the .32 ACP she keeps for protection. Criminals will get guns in the easiest way possible, and making entrepreneurial deals with other gangs a thousand miles away are not it. Those entrepreneurial deals are made for items that cannot be sourced locally (such as drugs), and even those are limited to the nearby area (a group in Florida imports the drugs, sell them to a group in Georgia, who sell them to a group in Virginia, who sell them to a group in Pennsylvania, who sell them to a group in New York – almost like grocery distribution except not as centralized). The ATF trace data (while not comprehensive) show that the majority of guns for almost every state that are traced are from that state. Coincidentally, the states nearby are the next largest source of guns, regardless of whether the state has lax gun control. Case in point, DC. The biggest supplier state for guns traced from DC: Maryland which has a lot more restrictive laws than Virginia. Far away states that “supply” guns are usually a function of state population. For instance, California shows up in the top 15 “suppliers” for lots of Eastern states, however, this is because there are more guns in California (very restrictive state) to be supplied than Utah (no restrictions according to Brady). By sheer coincidence, California has nearly 15 times the population of Utah.

Can we stop comparing gun restrictive laws and violent crime and start comparing gun restrictive laws and murder or injury with a firearm?…Don’t equate a gun with a knife. The number of people one individual can kill before being taken down by the police or other bystanders is far greater when that individual has a gun than when he has a knife.

You seem to be saying that decreasing the rate of “gun crime” will lead to a decrease in the overall number of _murders_, because guns are deadlier than other weapons. It’s a reasonable assumption.

But we can cut the need for this assumption out completely and deal with the facts by simply looking not at how the rate of “violent crimes” _or_ “gun crimes” are affected by gun control, but how the rate of _murders_, in particular, is affected by gun control.

However reasonable the thought-experiment conclusion is (and again, it _is_ reasonable), if a nation adopts strict gun control and its _murder_ rate goes up; or a nation loosens its gun restrictions and the _murder_ rate goes down, then the previously-reasonable idea that restricting access to guns saves lives becomes very hard to defend.

As the US has loosened its gun laws since the 1980s, our murder rate has gradually declined. As Britain has dramatically increased its restrictions on guns, their murder rate has gradually increased. Unlike a lot of my pro-gun friends, I _don’t_ claim this proves that guns reduce crime, but it _does_ dramatically undermine the thought experiment. Any murders prevented due to the “increased difficulty” of killing with a knife over a gun seem to be balanced by other unintended consequences of gun control*. No matter how reasonable and obvious the hypothesis is, you need to discard it when it doesn’t fit the edvidence.

So I rephrase my question: If gun control turns out not to reduce the _murder_ rate when countries adopt it, what’s the point of it?

You continue to be correct in that, the only logical way to stop this trend is to end all sales of guns to civilians. That’s not a conclusion you’d want someone in favor of gun control to come to…

Actually, that’s exactly the conclusion I want you to come to. We must both understand what we’re talking about: “closing the gun show loophole” and “banning assault weapons” and “one gun a month” and carry restrictions and interstate purchase prohibitions… They’re all useless burdens on the law-abiding that manifestly fail to save any lives. The _only_ policy that has any chance of reducing criminal access to guns is a flat ban on civilian sales, period. We’ll only get anywhere if we can have that debate openly, rather than quibbling over the kind of useless security theater advocated by modern US gun control groups. If we think we must to do something to reduce criminal access to guns, we must have the fight over flat-out banning guns. If we’re not prepared to ban guns, then kindly stop telling me I can’t carry my handguns or buy a rifle with a pistol grip.

[* - I don't want to speculate in too much detail in this discussion, but I suspect it's because bans prevent self defense with firearms. Since defensive gun use is almost always non-lethal, it probably causes an overall decline in the total number of violent deaths.]

- …increase the states with restrictive laws fivefold so that it’s 5-45 and you won’t see a fivefold decrease in gun available in those five states. Make it 25-25 and assume the states in each group are geographically contagious and you might be getting somewhere.

Exactly my point. We _have_ approximately five states with extremely restrictive gun laws, and gun-control activists are spending most (not all) of their time and energy trying to make those states more restrictive or protect extreme laws that have nothing to do with “trafficking” (like DC’s ban on concealed carry*). Under the proposed model, a rational organization would be putting its efforts into raising the number of states with purchase restrictions, not piling more and more extreme and burdensome laws onto the states that already have purchase requirements fundamentally more burdensome than the rest of the nation.

- …I don’t really care about the crime rate relative to gun control because the link is too tenuous and weak. A much stronger one, and the one I’ve been sticking to throughout is that restrictive gun control laws…drive the murder by gun rate down.

Once again, I feel like I must be misreading you. Are you saying that, even if the same number of people are brutally murdered, we should have burdensome restrictions on the law-abiding just to shift criminals to different deadly weapons? Why exactly are you concerned with reducing “gun murders” if it doesn’t change the rate of “murders”?

[* - I'm obviously using "state" loosely. ;) ]