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In some countries, such as the United States , there is controversy concerning the appropriate degree of firearm Regulation . One major aspect of the argument involves potential positive or negative correlations that many argue exist between crime, especially violent crime, and gun ownership. Both sides Actively Debate the relevance of gun laws and self-defense in modern society. Correlations are, of course, hard to establish, because countries with different gun laws are hardly ever the same in all other aspects. JOHN LOTT Some scholars, notably John Lott , claim to have discovered a positive correlation between gun control legislation and Crime s in which Criminal s confront citizens. Robert Ehrlich, in his book ''Nine Crazy Ideas in Science'' (ISBN 0691094950), examines this issue in Chapter 2, "More Guns Means Less Crime". He revisits John Lott's original data, asserting that the data was somewhat manipulated to "prove" a point. For example, many graphs are fit to the data, but do not show the data itself. Ehrlich claims that the raw data does not support Lott's thesis in the way that the fitted graph does. Ehrlich's conclusion is that more guns does not mean less crime, though it does not necessarily mean more crime either. There is an obvious implication that any conflict that involves guns will more deadly and more dangerous than any conflict that does not involve guns. UNITED KINGDOM VS. SWITZERLAND A the homicide rate for the United States Of America was 5.91 per 100,000 {Link without Title} . In addition, the firearms crime rate in the United Kingdom has increased since an almost total ban on handguns in 1997/8, with violent gun crimes, including shootings to death, increasing at around 40% year on year, despite otherwise declining levels of reported crime levels. Some claim that this demonstrates a negative correlation between more restrictive gun laws and violent crimes involving firearms. AUSTRALIA Australia has always had tougher gun laws than the U.S. - despite that country's own frontier history and its cultural similarities to the United States. In 1998, 54 Australians lost their lives to gun homicides, while in the States the number exceeded 13,000. The gun homicide rate in the U.S. is about 15 times that of Australia. JAPAN Another example is Japan, which has strict rules about gun ownership and a low crime rate. Only those at the top of the criminal tree own firearms and the general public are banned from owning anything that can deliver a projectile with more than 1 joule of kinetic energy. (Japan invented Airsoft for this reason.) Critics of this argument have pointed out Japan's history and culture as other possible explanations for its low crime rate. OVER-TIME CORRELATION WITHIN THE US The 1993 US Brady Bill is an example of a gun control law that has been generally correlated with a decrease in overall crime levels. Critics argue that the reduction was more driven by improving economic and other factors than by the gun control regulations, and further point out that during this same period, many states began issuing Concealed Carry licenses, resulting in increasing numbers of lawfully armed citizens. Because the Brady Bill was a national law, some claim that the measurement of its results must be treated as a single sample. That is, it should be considered to have no more nor less weight than the findings after a change in the laws of a single state or municipality. Conversely, the federal Assault Weapons Ban , which recently sunset, lead to no obvious change in firearms crime rates during its ten year run, and as yet (Q2 2005) no statistics are currently available to show if the removal of this ban has any effect. See Gun Politics . |
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