[quote]I think the point is that gun control hasn’t done anything to deter those crimes either.[/quote]
This argument as as valid as the right-wing claim that the Obama stimulus has failed: we did the stimulus, we still have unemployment, ergo stimulus can’t work. We tried to do gun control in DC, we still have an inordinate murder rate there, ergo gun control does not work. (Of course, the correct come-back is that the stimulus worked but it was too small, and that gun control works but it’s not enough to make DC look like Laguna Niguel.)
On the other hand, a lot of violent crime is cultural/structural/genetic (e.g. the likelihood of two acquaintances killing each other over a trivial dispute is mostly cultural). If we look at the only more-or-less developed country that has demographics similar to DC – South Africa – their murder rate is just as bad. I just saw an article that said that the rape rate in Congo was a hundred times that of the US. This is all completely cultural.
In fact, the low murder rate we have in the Western world is an anomaly. In the old days before the Industrial Revolution & such, it was entirely normal for an adolescent male to have a 20% chance of getting murdered in his lifetime. Things gradually got normalized in the West because violent alleles died off.
