I'm certainly not anti-gun, but just for the sake of discussion:evilmercer wrote: It shows statistics proving that with more gun control in Canada, Australia, England, and Whales violent crime and robberies go up and compare the same years to United States and show the declining trend here. The statistics are not just straight numbers a lot are based on per 100,000 people statistics so it is a better comparison when you are comparing the crime of very differently populated and sized countries.
I don't disagree with those statistics. Violent crime and robbery is a subset of total crime. Before I made up my mind, I'd want answer to the following.. And just for the point of making it easy to compare, let's just say US vs UK:
1) How does the murder rate compare in the US vs UK?
2) How many violent crimes were defended by legally owned firearms in the US? (This is an important number to me, as that more crime might have occurred w/o gun ownership)
3) Of murders committed, how many were accomplished by firearms?
My point is that the statistics can be used to support either position. I had a (relatively uneducated on my side) discussion with a Romanian once. Romania has a massive organized crime problem and is - in my view - the cybercrime hub of the world. It's bad locally and on the street. I like to call it the Eastern European New Jersey. He was discussing how bad the violent crime was in the US and how the number of violent gun deaths was massive compared to Romania. I didn't believe him, but I looked it up.
The murder rate in Romania is 2 per 100,000.
The murder rate in the US is 4.8 per 100,000.
Most of those murders are associated with firearms in the USA.
To me, this doesn't prove that it's a "gun problem". It could be a culture thing. It does prove - and you'll find it generally true that the US has a higher murder rate than most "civilized" countries. And most of those murders involve firearms.
Course, you could take away our guns and we'll just find another way to kill each other.. But it's hard to prove that.
Again, I mean this not as an anti-gun point. I post it so that you're still prepared with what the other side is going to say. You'll need to think about how you can respond to these types of statistics.