Comment on Anon breaks up
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoLook up overall crime statistics for both countries that restrict firearm access and those who don’t. You’ll find that overall violent crime ends up being proportional to the countries’ midi coefficient (a measurement of economic inequality). Firearm availability mainly changes the proportion of violent crimes involving firearms vs overall violent crime.
Like I said, most of the statistics you see are cherry-picked to give an overly simplistic view of crime to distract from the fact that economic inequality is a huge correlating factor
jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
While income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is positively correlated with violent crime, firearm availability has been shown to independently influence both the rate and lethality of violence.
According to Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza (2002, The Journal of Law and Economics), there is a significant cross-national association between income inequality and homicide rates. However, firearm access is not merely a determinant of the method used in violent crime—it also affects the frequency and outcome of such incidents.
Data from the Small Arms Survey and the Global Burden of Disease project indicate that countries with high rates of civilian firearm ownership (e.g., the United States) experience substantially higher rates of firearm homicide, suicide, and accidental gun death than peer nations with stricter gun regulations (e.g., the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia), despite similar or lower Gini coefficients.
For example, the U.S. firearm homicide rate was 6.1 per 100,000 in 2021 (CDC WONDER), compared to 0.5 per 100,000 in Canada and less than 0.1 in countries like Japan and the U.K. This disparity persists even when controlling for overall violent crime or economic inequality.
Moreover, studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have found that the presence of firearms in a home significantly increases the risk of homicide and suicide, particularly among women and children (see Kellermann et al., 1993; Anglemyer et al., 2014).
Therefore, while inequality is an important factor, firearm regulation has a demonstrable and independent effect on both the incidence and deadliness of violent crime. The distinction between type and frequency does not eliminate the public health implications of firearm prevalence.