Gun Law Reality
The math demonstrating the absurdity of firearm prohibitions.
Overview of gun laws in Australia before Bondi Beach:
The push to ban “assault weapons” is a manufactured pivot:
Why gun bans can never help citizens:
The truth behind GVA “school shooting” statistics:
Gun Law Reality
The typical person in the United States will be neither aided nor harmed by a gunshot. When examining the right to keep and bear arms, either side is looking at the marginal benefits on a scale of single digits or less per 100,00 population on an annual basis.
The most clear and commonly used statistic is the intentional homicide rate compared to the firearm ownership rate. Comparing these two, there is no correlation between cross-sectional firearm ownership rate and intentional homicide rate globally or regionally.
Here is an article illustrating the issue for US states. Here’s another covering regional and global breakdowns. Here’s another covering OECD standard developed countries and global stats. Here is a before-and-after analysis regarding various gun bans. Feel free to check the numbers as they are publicly available.
Australia Gun Laws
Australia is frequently cited as an example of successful gun control, but no research has been able to show conclusively that the Australian NFA had any effect. In fact, the US saw a similar drop in homicide over the same time period without enacting significant gun controls, as more fully explained in this write-up.
Similarly, the UK saw no benefit from gun control enacted throughout the 20th century. The UK has historically had a lower homicide rate than even its European neighbors since the 14th Century. Despite the UK’s major gun control measures in 1968, 1988, and 1997, homicides generally increased from the 1960s up to the early 2000s. Also, it wasn’t a massive increase in the number of law enforcement officers in the UK that caused the homicide rates to decrease.
Note that I cite overall homicide rates, rather than firearm homicide rates. This is because I presume that you are looking for marginal benefits in the outcome. Stabbed to death, beaten to death, or shot to death is an equally bad outcome unless you ascribe some irrational extra moral weight to a shooting death. Reducing the firearm homicide rate is not an improvement if it is simply replaced by other means, which seems to be the case.
Proposed bans on “assault weapons” intended to ban certain semi-automatic rifles are even more absurd, as rifles of all kinds are the least commonly used weapon for homicide, losing out to blunt instruments, personal weapons (hands and feet), and knives. More people are killed by being punched or kicked to death than shot with any kind of rifle - “assault” or otherwise.
As for the more active value of the right to keep and bear arms, the lowest credible estimates of Defensive Gun Use that even anti-gun Everytown agrees with are in the range of 55-80k each year, which is about 16.9-24.5 per 100k; some estimate it could be as high as 4.7 million DGUs per year.
Additionally, there is the historical precedent that every genocide of the 20th century has been enacted upon a disarmed population. The Ottomans disarmed the Armenians. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The USSR and China (nationalists and communists) disarmed everyone. Events of this scale are mercifully rare but are extraordinarily devastating. The modern US, and certainly not Europe, is not somehow specially immune from this sort of slaughter except by its people being aware of how they were perpetrated, and they always first establish arms control over citizens.
Let’s examine the moral math on this: Tyrannical governments killed about 262 million people in the 20th century. The US represents about 4.5% of the world population. 0.045 × 262,000,000 / 100 = 123,514 murders per year by tyrannical governments on average for a population the size of the US.
Considering how gun control (or lack thereof) is statistically uncorrelated with homicide rates, and that there were 11,004 murders with firearms in the US in 2016, the risk assessment ought to conclude: Yes, the risk of tyrannical government is statistically much greater than any possible risk that general firearm ownership could represent.
The historical evidence of disarmament preceding atrocity indicates that genocidal maniacs generally just don’t want to deal with an armed population, but can the US population actually resist the federal government, though? Time for more math.
The US population is about 326 million. Conservative estimates of the US gun-owning population is about 115 million. The entire US military, including civilian employees and non-combat personnel, is about 2.8 million. Less than half of that number (1.2M) is active duty. Less than half of the military is combat arms, with support personnel making up the majority. In a popular insurgency, the people themselves are the support for combat units of the insurgency, which therefore means that active insurgents are combat units, not generally support units.
You have, optimistically, 600,000 federal combat troops vs 1% (1.15 million) of exclusively the gun owning Americans actively engaged in an armed insurgency, with far larger numbers passively or actively supporting said insurgency.
The military is now outnumbered 2:1 by a population with small arms roughly comparable to their own and significant education to manufacture IEDs, hack or interfere with drones, and probably the best average marksmanship of a general population outside of maybe Switzerland. Additionally, this population includes 19.6 million veterans, including 4.5 million who have served after 9/11, who are potentially trainers, officers, or NCOs for this force.
The only major things the insurgents are lacking are armor, air power, and proper anti-material weapons. Armor and air aren’t necessary, or even desirable, for an insurgency. Anti-material weapons can be imported or captured, with armored units simply not being engaged by any given unit until materials necessary to attack those units are acquired. Close-air like attack helicopters are vulnerable to sufficient volumes of small arms fire and .50 BMG rifles. All air power is vulnerable to sabotage or raids while on the ground for maintenance.
This is before even before we address the defection rate from the military, or how police and National Guard units will respond to the military killing their friends, family, and neighbors.
Basically, a sufficiently large uprising could absolutely murder the military. Every bit of armament the population has necessarily reduces that threshold of “sufficiently large”. With the raw amount of small arms and people who know how to use them in the US, “sufficiently large” isn’t all that large in relative terms.
If, as you say, even Everytown agrees that at least 55,000 - 80,000 times a year, gun owners prevent violence, and that there are 11,000 gun murders per year in the US, then clearly the notion of eliminating private ownership of guns serves only to vastly increase the incidence of murder.
The rationale for this statement is recognition that the potential murder rate is constant - the motives for violence and murder will not change in a society - and in fact, may go up when emotions are no longer contained by fear of deterrence. But the success rate of completion of the act of murder is reduced by the presence of guns as a deterrent. Guns in the hands of private citizen gun owners. By 55,000 to 80,000 people per year!
The question then becomes: who accepts the responsibility for the additional 55,000 to 80,000 murders - between 5 and 7+ times the current rate - that will occur in the absence of that deterrent? Who has the moral authority to say that these people are to die in order that "my" emotional preference that guns not be in private hands be satisfied?
What gives such people such a confused moral compass that they cannot see that in their titular crusade to "save" lives, their proposed approach will, in fact, cause more deaths than for the status quo - and that moreover, INCREASES in private ownership might well - as statistics appear to show - result in a further reduction in deaths, thanks to the deterrent effect?
If police were present at the moment the crime were to occur, no one would doubt that it would likely not occur; why should it be any different if the deterrent force were an armed private citizen instead? Why are these people to die thanks to the anti-gun community's illogic and unwillingness to face the truth that an armed society - one with citizens as equals, rather than a mix of weak and strong - is a peaceful society? That it is deterrence that is the key to safety, not unarmed victimhood?