Guns and Violent crime.

A lot of the available data shows that the link between guns and crime is virtually a wash. I was wondering what data was used to justify the link.

This is quite a long running debate - if you look at the Democracy 2 forums, you’ll find pages on it.

Those who are in favour of gun control - which, declaring my colours, includes me - see it as obvious that restricting access to firearms will reduce violent offences. Those who are opposed see it as equally obvious that if guns are controlled, only the criminals have them, making people less safe.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s an academic consensus, and situations which seem to work in some places don’t work in others. Unless you can quote solid research, it’s probably best to leave it as an agreement to disagree.

Plus, Democracy 3 is really moddable! You can trivially reverse the relationship in your game, if you’re interested.

I’m still trying to install a fascist dictatorship without getting assassinated

I find it interesting that you request links for the developers research to justify their choices, whilst offering none of your own other then “its a wash” ?

Please provide some.

Although my first sentence may sound contentious, I truly mean it from a perspective of peer review/debate, rather than ideological stance. I would be interested in knowing where your own info comes from, for my own edification.

Anecdotally, I would think some data could be gathered by comparing countries with differing gun laws, particularly the affect on crime after gun laws were introduced.

My own “opinion” would be that although crime may or may not increase/decrease, violent crime and accidental deaths/injury during crime would most likely decrease. This is just an opinion, certainly not saying it is backed by hard data.

The argument of only criminals having guns, seems pretty weak IMO. Restrict gun ownership to outlaw automatics, does not mean every single criminal will still have one anyway. It would take time but slowly automatic guns would be confiscated/seized and the automatic gun population reduced. There would always be “some”, for sure, but some will always do less damage then many.

Again I have no ideological opinion on this issue, makes no difference to me if people have guns or don’t.

I always dread this debate:D It’s so polarized. For what its worth, I did do some research, and found that the studies I looked at did seem to show a correlation. obviously no two countries are the same and there could be other factors. here is some data to further the debate:

List of countries by intentional homicide rate
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co … icide_rate
UK: 1.2
France: 1.1
Germany: 0.8
US: 4.7
Canada: 1.6

So US much higher, but Canada isn’t that high, given they have fairly lax gun laws compared to Europe. And Canada has less police per capita than the USA, so you would imagine more crime?
The US actually has more crime according to this:
nationmaster.com/compare/Can … ates/Crime

There is also this data:
datamasher.org/mash-ups/crim … #table-tab

Although I think that might not be that much help, as it could be inverse-causal, ie: More people keep a loaded gun in the house because there is high crime.
In an ideal world, the game would model the debate in mroe depth, such as:

  1. Modeling the extent of ‘gun culture’, relating to gang culture and the glamorization of guns
  2. Model numbers of guns in circulation
  3. Model fear of crime and police response times, to accurately portray the phenomena of people owning a gun for self defence.
  4. Model law enforcement effectiveness and forensic skill, thus allowing us to disincentivise gun crime by a higher assurance that the perpetrator will be caught.

The trouble is once you go down that route, the game becomes unplayably complex :smiley:
And yes, I fully expect someone to release a simple mod that toggles the effect the other way, and I suspect it will be a popular one :smiley:

So like real politics then? :wink:

Thanks for the reply cliff. I understand the dread of contentious issues like firearms. I am very pro gun but I understand that a lot of people don’t like them. Either they are scared of them or just ignorant about them -usually both. The US has always been a gun culture. We were founded by rebellion, that was ignited by an attempt to seize our firearms. In a lot of ways, the gun symbolizes our freedoms. I think that law-abiding citizens should be able to own guns if they wish. I think we need more good guys with guns than bad guys with guns. I hope we can all agree on that.

A lot of the gun violence is inner city gang shootings connected to drugs. We have a horrible drug policy here that, when coupled with our prison system, causes very high recidivism. Take note that some of the cities with strict gun control, by American standards, have the most gun violence. Chicago, L.A, D.C, etc. You can draw all sorts of conclusions from this but do strict laws make it better or worse for everyone? I would argue that it makes things worse. Criminals do not go to guns stores and buy their guns. They obtain them illegally- they’re criminals, of course they don’t follow the law. The vast majority are obtained through “straw purchases” or shady FFL’s both kids of sales are illegal.

I found this article from PBS that cites an ATF study of how criminals get their guns: “http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/guns.html

I think better enforcement of our current laws would go a long way to helping the problem. The idea that guns could be confiscated and we’ll live in a crime-free utopia is absurd. We have over 300 million guns (legal guns that the government knows about) owned by over 100 million people. You’ll never get them all. Arms are still being sold on the open and black markets from WWII.

I have degrees in both Political Science and History and I would argue that the U.S is more prone to violence because of the sheer number ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse people living together. It’s easier for a small population of homogeneous people to live together than the reverse. Always has been.

I think the correlation should not be so strong in the game either way. I think it would be awesome to have certain countries have different rates/chances of violent crime based on the numbers rather than a cause/effect that is hard to prove one way or the other. I can tell you I honestly love the way that certain issues/policies have little or no effect on the country than certain groups hating you.

as far as I understand, after having discussed this heavily mainly with Americans (European myself from a country with only hunting rifles legal under license)
USA,Canada is an excellent example as, like said, Canada has less police, less homicide, less crime and more guns per capita so the claim that guns directly correlate with violent crime everywhere doesn’t hold entirely

However the understanding I’ve got from discussions of this is that it’s much more a question of the population. United states has a very varied population with lots and lots of different ethnicities, ideals and groupings of all kinds. every colour and every ideals are represented in larger or smaller quantities and ever since the dawn of society this is one of the main causes of conflict and trouble.

looking at countries with much lower crime rates this also makes sense, as most other countries are much more homogeneous in their population.
Racial discrimination, clashes of belief, frustrations with poverty, mental issues that are not taken care of etc seems like a more plausible explanation for homicides.
The availability of guns in some cases escalate the conflict from a broken jaw or knife cut, to a deadly gun shot wound, but it’s not the original cause and in probably many cases the gun would have been obtained in a different way had it been illegal.
From what I gather from various documentaries then USA has a bunch of issues in those areas, unlike the more democratic-socialist states of Europe and Canada with their welfare net take care of this earlier and prevent these issues from escalating. And of course has much fewer due to more homogeneous population.

A lot of people like gun but gun is a dangerous thing that can people.now there have many violent crime cause of gun.


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Take Japan. Its population is between 1/4 and 1/5 that of the United States but guns are banned there and gun deaths are way lower. gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa … icides/194

There is a political divide that is not represented by default rules.

Capitalists should oppose gun control, because it is government intervention in private enterprise; including security firms and gun dealers, and guns can be suitable to defend against intruders on private property. Socialists should support gun control, because guns give the rich (who can afford high-end guns and armed guards) an advantage above the poor.

Knife control is an interesting parallel issue. The knife is the poor man’s gun; they have in other words been carried by people of lower social classes and ethnic minorities, so the southern US states, where rich white people had guns and made the laws, had more harsh knife control than gun control.

The Dilemmas and Events mod contains, among other things, a dilemma about knife control.
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