See for Yourself if
Guns Cause Murder

Gun prohibitionists say that gun-control works. They say gun-control laws reduce the number of guns possessed by law-abiding gun owners. They say that is good because guns cause crime. In particular, they say that guns cause extremely violent crimes like murder. I don't know if that is true, but I do know that we can find out. Countries have different cultures and different rules about owning guns. That leads to different rates of gun ownership. Different countries also have different murder rates. Put them together and we can see if guns cause crime.

The data isn't as good as we'd like it to be. The last comprehensive international data on gun ownership was from the Small Arms Survey of 2017. People can update their estimates based on trends. That isn't the same as real survey data taken in the last few years. The other data on murder is from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Study on Homicide.

About half the countries are missing when we look at the data on murder rates. Japan and France are glaring examples. I asked a demographer/sociologist about that missing data. She said that many countries do a poor job of sorting out murder, suicide, and defensive homicide. In a perfect study, we'd have worldwide survey data taken in the same year. We don't have that. It turns out that those small errors don't matter in the slightest.

Let's look at the original claims by gun prohibitionists. .....