Subject: Re: The Gun Debate: Right VS Left
Since homicides now are half of what they were in the 1980's, can we conclude that today's gun control advocates are somehow better people than those of the 80's who failed to agitate against private ownership of guns?

Are today's gun control advocates perceptions being distorted by the constant and sensational reporting about gun crime in the same fashion I was misled about the overall crime rate?

Somewhat, ye.s
The homicide rate has plummeted from an all-time high in 1993 at about 10 per 100K down to today's ~6.5 per 100K. The firearm homicide rate has remained basically flat - dropping from about 7 per 100K in 1993 to 6.7 per 100K in 2022. Citations for the data below. As you might expect, the proportion of homicides committed with firearms (as opposed to other weapons) has increased - the homicide rate for every other method has collapsed, but the murder rate with guns has not dropped very much.

Gun control advocates point to that data and argue, with some legitimacy, that with every other metric of crime dropping precipitously, something is causing that one type of crime - gun homicide - to remain at levels near the all-time historical peak. When no other crime, at all, is anywhere close to historic peaks. Since every other type of crime has collapsed in frequency, something other than general social or economic or law enforcement conditions must be contributing to that elevated level. To their mind, that "something" is the broad availability of firearms.

That said, I'm not sure the data entirely support that. The spike in gun violence (as opposed to other crime) was short, sharp, and pronounced in the last few years. Overall gun murder was close to a multi-decadal low in the early 2010's - it really only picked up between 2014 and now. In the later days of the Obama Administration, vastly fewer people were being killed with guns by other people** than at any time in our recent history.

But that's the thing - the increase in gun homicide has been so rapid that we don't know why it's happening, we don't know if it's temporary or permanent, and so we don't know if policy choices short of removing firearms altogether (or nearly so) will affect it.

https://www.pewresearch.org/sh...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previ...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...


**Many many people were killing themselves with guns, as we've discussed, but I don't think that this thread is necessarily about that and I don't want to hijack it into that discussion again.