Thanks again for the response. I’m going to have to look into the settlement patterns of Australia before I go any further down that rabbit hole, because I’m not educated enough to make a strong comment. You’ve presented new info to me, and I thank you for that.
Your claim that you could double the number of guns with no appreciable effect on crime is surely correct. US is saturated with guns, in the statistical sense.
The inverse possibility, of halving the number of guns, surely would affect crime, ‘though perhaps not much.
I’ve looked into this exact scenario, actually, and run the math on it. You might find that worth looking over.
The net conclusion is we’d have to buy back around 80 million dollars worth of guns to avert one homicide. Probably more, since my assumptions in this calculation were pretty generous to the pro-buyback side of the argument. The reason why is, of course, we are so far past this saturation point that getting down to a spot where guns are scarce is simply not an option here. And I would hold that opinion whether I was pro gun or anti gun, because math.
But even that analysis misses some more recent research here in the USA, which came out after I wrote it. When you dis-aggregate domestic and non-domestic homicides and compare to ownership ratios, you discover that even at a multivariate level, the relationship between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate is literally zero for non-domestic homicide, and all the variation is within domestic homicide. I think this makes sense, because domestic homicides are largely unplanned, while non-domestic homicides are in fact planned. More on that here:
These mathematical discoveries might inform sensible policy that has some actual efficacy. For instance, the USA could probably not break the bank by running a buyback program focused specifically at homes where there are known domestic violence issues. That only amounts to between 1000 and 2000 homicides per year, out of 330 million people, but it would be something, and would target the smaller pool where gun ownership and gun homicide are actually related.
How you’d actually implement that, however, is an entire different ball of wax.
