What would happen if one day, magically, all guns disappear in the whole country?
You mean, like a Magic Gun Evaporation Fairy? We’ve covered this on HWFO before.
Since no such thing exists, it’s an entirely impossible hypothetical. But I’ll entertain the impossibility because it’s an important impossibility to entertain.
Those two rates would plummet to zero.
Yes, but it’s not linear. Don’t make the mistake this guy did:
I have no idea how that guy ended up with a job writing for CNET. Since you’re obviously a lot smarter than he is, given your profile, you’ll better understand truth about the relationship. It is very flat (as predicted by Siegel in the buybacks link below) with a sharp dip down around the origin as guns finally become scarce. We are so past that scarcity saturation point here that getting us down to that saturation point is basically impossible. (again, see Buybacks link below)
Would the overall suicide and homicide rates for any cause remain constant or would they go down? If they would remain the same then guns would indeed not be a factor. If they go down, then it would tells us that guns make suicide/homicide easier and then they would certainly be part of the problem.
We’ve looked at this too.
Suicide rates in women would stay exactly the same. Suicide rates in men would go down, because men are hastier in their decisions to commit suicide. The best policy, given that there is no magic gun evaporation fairy, would be to better educate gun owning men about the risks, and enculturate them to give their guns to a buddy if they’re in a bad spot.
We also must absolutely prevent government from interfering with that gun transfer. Thousands of Californians a year may be dying purely because they don’t have the legal option to hand their guns to a buddy for safe keeping during a rough patch.
Homicide rates would go down some, but not tremendously. And the costs of overall gun reduction are astronomical here because we have so many guns. You’re buying back 80 million dollars worth of guns to prevent one homicide. (actually you’re probably buying back a lot more) Math:
Further, if we disaggregate gun homicide into domestic homicide and non-domestic homicide, the correlation between ownership rate and homicide literally disappears, even at a multivariate level, for the non-domestic category. It literally doesn’t exist. The only category where it matters is domestic homicide, so if we’re going to do something about that, it should be targeted to that specific kind of homicide, which only makes up between 1000 and 2000 homicides per year.
All of these things would be true whether I was pro gun or anti gun, I just couldn’t cram them all into the article you’re responding to. Please feel free to browse the other material, and thanks for the reply.
