You’re wrong here. I actually did a study on this at university. I’m going off a long memory here so the numbers are not precise, but close enough.
In 1972 the populations of metro Tokyo and metro New York were roughly the same. In that time NY had about 1,450 homicides in a year. Tokyo had two. Tokyo had strict gun control laws. When gun murders were removed it still left about 800 murders by beatings and knives.
Clearly, the problem wasn’t guns, but that people in NYC tended to kill one another whilst people in Tokyo did not.
An interesting side point was that gun violence in television was often blamed. But people in Japan had wild samurai themed violence on television. Regardless, it didn’t inspire them to pick up their knives and cut people.
Also, in response to your last point I believe most violent crime rates in Britain are higher than ours now. There has been almost an epidemic of violent knife crime in recent years.
In Switzerland, however, unless they’ve just recently changed the rule, almost every home with a man it it had a fully automatic assault rifle (we’re generally semi-automatic here in the USA) and ammunition. Yet violent crime is very rare in Switzerland.
The instrument is not the issue.
Edit: regarding Germany, as above, you simply substantiate by including other crime statistics that the problem isn’t the gun. The problem is Americans are more violent against their fellow citizens than Germans.
Also, we lack the greater homogeneity of places like Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. I know we’re always told — on the news, in school, by politicians — that diversity isn’t a fault, it’s a feature, but nowhere on earth has diversity worked out well rather than leading to problems. That’s not opinion, study the world and you’ll find it is what it is.
[quote=captcha]
Here is a gun control success story.
Tokyo is the safest major city in the world. Only 59,000 licensed gun owners live in Tokyo.[25] Per one million inhabitants, Tokyo has 40 reported muggings a year; New York has 11,000.[26] The handgun murder rate is at least 200 times higher in America than Japan.[27] The official homicide rate in Japan in 1988 was 1.2 homicide cases per 100,000 population, while in America it was 8.4 homocide cases per 100,000.[28]
Robbery is almost as rare as murder. Indeed, armed robbery and murder are both so rare that they usually make the national news, regardless of where they occur.[29] Japan’s robbery rate is 1.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. The reported American rate is 220.9.[30] People walk anywhere in Japan at night, and carry large sums of cash.[31]
Germany has fairly strict in US terms, but relatively common gun law by European standards. Its population is more than 1/4 of US population.
Murders with firearms are 3% of US number.
Prisoner population is 3.5% of that in US.
Rapes – 9% of US #.
Robberies – 14%.
Car theft – 7%.
But it does have higher software privacy rate.
Now you show me a modern western democracy with stricter gun laws and higher crime rate than the U.S.[/quote]
