DEBATENATE

Topics / Guns

The challenge

“More guns mean more crime”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. The record says the opposite of the slogan. Pew Research found the gun homicide rate fell forty-nine percent from nineteen ninety-three to twenty ten, the same years Americans bought millions more guns. If guns caused crime like rain causes puddles, the puddles should have grown. They shrank. You'll cite studies tying carry laws to more violent crime. Some find that, and a National Research Council review said the evidence couldn't settle it. The gun didn't raise the kid who pulled the trigger. And yes, a free, armed country will see some gun deaths. That's the price of the right that guards the rest. Let me ask you this: why did crime fall while the gun count climbed? It's not the number of guns. It's whose hands they're in.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. For two decades guns went up and gun murder went down. Try squaring that with the slogan.

    Pew Research Center reported in 2013 that the U.S. gun homicide rate fell forty-nine percent from its 1993 peak to 2010.

  2. Guns stop crimes too. That side of the ledger never makes the evening news.

    The 2013 Institute of Medicine and National Research Council report, requested by the CDC, said national survey estimates of defensive gun uses range from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, while also noting a much lower estimate of about 108,000 from the National Crime Victimization Survey.

  3. The best-known expert review could not show that letting law-abiding citizens carry drives crime up.

    The National Research Council's 2004 review, Firearms and Violence, concluded that the existing evidence did not allow a determination of a causal link between right-to-carry laws and crime rates.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Newer research, like John Donohue and colleagues' 2019 study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, finds that right-to-carry laws are associated with higher violent crime rates over time.

Nate: That study exists, and it's a serious one. Other researchers using other methods land somewhere else, which is why the question is still open. A disputed finding about one kind of law doesn't prove a bumper sticker, not when gun homicide fell nearly in half while Americans kept buying guns.

What he grants the other side

Some serious studies do link right-to-carry laws to more violent crime.

The lines

Sources

  1. Pew Research Center, Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware (2013)
  2. Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence (2013)
  3. National Research Council, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004)
  4. John J. Donohue, Abhay Aneja and Kyle D. Weber, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime: A Comprehensive Assessment Using Panel Data and a State-Level Synthetic Control Analysis (2019)

More like this