A huge confounder in “gun ownership and crimes” would be “reports of crimes by media in an area”. In Italy it predicted fear of crime way more than actual crime rates.
Scared people would buy guns in a percentage a lot higher than murderers and other criminals, and the number of crimes reported by media isn’t well correlated to the actual number of crimes.
How much you’d talk about your guns and how everyone has guns and shoot each other would make that option a lot more salient in people’s mind when considering murders, I’d expect Germany and Canada to talk a lot less of guns than the USA after adjusting for the number of guns the population owns.
I’d expect a culture of guns to cause a culture of violence. If having a cultural weapon is a common thing in your country, your self image would change. You’d be more likely to buy one, and once you buy one you would be more likely to end up with a self image of a “warrior”, who is more likely to react with violence to certain situations. Also an armed population weakens the state monopoly on violence, and might encourage people into taking matters in their own hands.
Since the culture of guns is there in the USA from day one, it might have caused a large part of the other cultural factor. Taking guns away might change the culture as well, it would be awkward for everyone to switch to knives.
Overall, I feel that guns and murders would not scale linearly with each other, and that some points of this analysis assume such a linear mechanism would be most of the relationship, so the number of murders avoided by having less gun would decrease more. I have no concrete ideas at the moment on how to try a different analysis, though.
A huge confounder in “gun ownership and crimes” would be “reports of crimes by media in an area”. In Italy it predicted fear of crime way more than actual crime rates.
Scared people would buy guns in a percentage a lot higher than murderers and other criminals, and the number of crimes reported by media isn’t well correlated to the actual number of crimes.
How much you’d talk about your guns and how everyone has guns and shoot each other would make that option a lot more salient in people’s mind when considering murders, I’d expect Germany and Canada to talk a lot less of guns than the USA after adjusting for the number of guns the population owns.
I’d expect a culture of guns to cause a culture of violence. If having a cultural weapon is a common thing in your country, your self image would change. You’d be more likely to buy one, and once you buy one you would be more likely to end up with a self image of a “warrior”, who is more likely to react with violence to certain situations. Also an armed population weakens the state monopoly on violence, and might encourage people into taking matters in their own hands.
Since the culture of guns is there in the USA from day one, it might have caused a large part of the other cultural factor. Taking guns away might change the culture as well, it would be awkward for everyone to switch to knives.
Overall, I feel that guns and murders would not scale linearly with each other, and that some points of this analysis assume such a linear mechanism would be most of the relationship, so the number of murders avoided by having less gun would decrease more. I have no concrete ideas at the moment on how to try a different analysis, though.