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Guns Guns Guns
Guest
"Between Friday and Sunday, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation approved background checks for 2,887 people who wanted to purchase a firearm — a 43 percent increase over the previous Friday through Sunday and a 39 percent jump over those same days on the first weekend of July."
Private gun ownership is a fact of life in the U.S.
The country tops the charts worldwide in terms of civilian gun ownership.
The question is how to keep them away from people who perpetrate crimes like the recent shootings in Aurora, Colo., and in Oak Creek, Wis.
That's the tricky part — partially because getting a gun in the U.S. can be fairly easy.
But is there a link between gun restrictions and fewer murders?
Paul Barrett says the answer is no. "Criminologists have studied it, and the consensus is that those laws simply did not have a statistically meaningful effect on crime rates."
Barrett says making slight changes to existing laws won't bring down the homicide rate.
The equation of "more guns equal more crime" just doesn't add up, he says.
"There's a relationship between the presence of guns and the lethality of crime, but there is not a cause-and-effect, simple formula that will solve crime problems by simply regulating, in slightly different ways, how easily you can acquire a gun," he says.
"We fixate, understandably, on the aberrational mass-shooting events, but they're actually not our main social problem," he says. "Our main social problem is the overall gun homicide rate."
"There is just not a lot of popular demand for stricter gun control," he says. "The public opinion polls tell you that."
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21142159/gun-sales-up-since-tragedy
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/12/158659172/breaking-down-gun-violence-no-simple-formula
Private gun ownership is a fact of life in the U.S.
The country tops the charts worldwide in terms of civilian gun ownership.
The question is how to keep them away from people who perpetrate crimes like the recent shootings in Aurora, Colo., and in Oak Creek, Wis.
That's the tricky part — partially because getting a gun in the U.S. can be fairly easy.
But is there a link between gun restrictions and fewer murders?
Paul Barrett says the answer is no. "Criminologists have studied it, and the consensus is that those laws simply did not have a statistically meaningful effect on crime rates."
Barrett says making slight changes to existing laws won't bring down the homicide rate.
The equation of "more guns equal more crime" just doesn't add up, he says.
"There's a relationship between the presence of guns and the lethality of crime, but there is not a cause-and-effect, simple formula that will solve crime problems by simply regulating, in slightly different ways, how easily you can acquire a gun," he says.
"We fixate, understandably, on the aberrational mass-shooting events, but they're actually not our main social problem," he says. "Our main social problem is the overall gun homicide rate."
"There is just not a lot of popular demand for stricter gun control," he says. "The public opinion polls tell you that."
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21142159/gun-sales-up-since-tragedy
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/12/158659172/breaking-down-gun-violence-no-simple-formula