Gun Control & RKBA

First off, most violent crimes don't involve guns so reducing the number of privately owned guns by 30% would only have dropped violent crime by 10% or so... assuming that a substitute weapon was not used.

Second, the violent crime rate dropped because us liberals were able to get our social agenda passed a generation before. By cleaning the lead out of the air and water, and by giving women control over their reproductive organs via safe, legal, and readily available abortion and birth-control services the kids born after about 1972 were less likely to be born in circumstances that foster a life of violent crime AND were not brain-damaged from lead poisoning. So twenty years later, the supply of new violent criminals dropped sharply as healthy, wanted babies grew into young adults and they were in better circumstances.

The drop in crime was not due to hardware control; it was due to getting our social agenda passed! The more women control their reproduction, the more the air and water is clean, and the more we treat drug addiction as a treatable illness rather than a criminal proceeding, the lower our crime rate will be.

And I find it fascinating that, according to the survey, gun ownership rate would drop from 45% (or so) in 1990 to 35% (or so) in 2000, that somehow a quarter of gun owners would just get rid of all of their guns... particularly when new gun sales were doing quite nicely during the 90's.







I dunno. If a quarter of gun owners decided to get rid of their guns, where did they go? That's a lot of used guns hitting the market, dozens of millions, yet new-gun sales remained steady at about 15 guns per 1,000 people per year through most of the 90's after a surge in about 1993 that probably had to do with the 1993 AWB.

It's entirely possible that sizeable fraction of gun owners decided they weren't going to tell a voice on a phone if there was a gun in the house, particularly with a gun-control president in the White House. Note that when Dubya was elected the number goes back up while new-gun sales remain flat; the fact that a Republican was in the White House might mean that fewer gun owners lied to the voice on the phone during that era.