Using the chart:
Unqualified Murder
1996: 1.7
2013: 1.2 (it's even lower now)
Manslaughter, unchanged.
Total homicides
1996: 1.8
2013: 1.2, down.
Sexual assaults are up, though they don't have anything to do with guns.
Armed robbery
1996: 34.2
2013: 24.3, down.
Unarmed Robbery
1996: 55.2
2013: 26.2, down.
Total Robbery
1996: 89.4
2013: 51.47, down.
Kidnaping
1996: 2.6
2013: 2.6
Almost every category has gone down and only one has increased over the span. But we already know that gun related violence has gone down and that mass shootings that were in the double digits in the 11 years prior to changing the laws haven't happened in the twenty-one years since.
That's a profound difference.
Dramatically better?
Suicides also went up in Australia, not down. That's not safeguarding.
Sales tax may have increased too, but neither have anything to do with gun safety laws, unless you want to talk about gun related suicides.
Suicides in Australia are strongly tied to drug abuse with around half of the post mortems showing evidence of those in the system of the suicide. And it's a relatively recent trend. Prior to the Port Arthur sponsored gun laws were increasing by one percent per year and declined, after an extinction flare, by about 1.5 percent per year until fairly recently, when suicide numbers began to rise again. Non firearm related suicides were climbing by around 2.4 percent before the laws and saw a similar decline with the same caveat. JAMA (
link)
Dramatically better? Only the black knight would think so.
Yes, gun related violence is dramatically better. No mass shootings, reduced levels of gun violence, gun accidents, etc.
You'll agree that
this shows that areas outside of big cities have more guns per capita than big cities (in addition to the Pew data you ignored before):
That's a lot of data on gun concentrations. And?
Yet, the most murders are in the big cities
Right, where most people are. There are also more heart attacks, cancer, births, etc.
There is no doubt that big city crimes in other western countries jack up crime rates there, too.
Or, it's likely true that any densely populated area will have more of about everything you can imagine, including but not limited to McDonalds.
But if you take the big cities out of the data
Aka, most people...
, or even just certain places in big cities out of the data, then crime rates are about the same across the western nations...
Demonstrate that with a study instead of a supposition, but you're still mostly talking about numbers. Disperse the city population and you should see the same sort of numbers.
But again, the numbers of deaths by handgun here compared to any of those places (with their share of cities) is much greater. And the number of mass shootings? Also not good for us. So if we want to reduce our own absurd death toll and make recurrences of that sort of thing less likely we should enact serious and universal gun laws designed toward that end using the working models we have in abundance.
Stop making laws against people who aren't the problem.
Rather, stop declaring truths not in evidence and trying to avoid the clear and empirical truth that universal gun laws, intelligently applied, work to do precisely what we should all be interested in doing, reducing gun violence and senseless death among us.
And recognize that even if you take guns away from everyone, the crime will continue until you fix the problem in the big cities.
So will teen pregnancies. But you can't cure every social ill with laws designed to address one. And, for who knows how many times now, I'm all for seriously addressing inner city problems, most of which are heavily tied to poverty.
A good place to start would be correlating problems. Cleaning up gangs, black markets, and broken homes. We know of things we can do that will help fix these problems that aren't hard to do. And they would even make these same problems, to the extent they are in places outside of big cities, better as well. And it is not a matter of fixing poverty, although getting rid of these problems results in less poverty as one of the unseen benefits.
Again though, those are complicated issues we've been trying to address for generations. We shouldn't give up, but our track record indicates we aren't going to fix a wide assortment of social ills any time soon. In the meantime we can and should attack this problem with the resources/laws we have every objective reason to understand will work, and make the whole of it better when and if we begin to unravel that other knot.
It's a win-win-win, even in the unseen.
Since I'm fairly sure almost no one on the right has been seriously active in addressing inner city social issues beyond cutting funding to programs attempting to do that, it mostly seems like a distract-fail from that side of it.
Every Western nation that isn't us puts the lie to that statement.
and you haven't said anything yet to show otherwise (and I'm not ignoring your gun data)
In order, I absolutely have and you absolutely are.