I thought of something else. Ignoring the practicalities of achieving the following:
- everyone carries a gun - no-one gets shot
- no-one carries a gun - no-one gets shot
Which is going to be the case?
I realise this is entirely speculation, but the firearms ownership rate between the US and NZ is approximately 3:1 and the only major difference in the gun laws is that handguns are not freely available in NZ (plus the attitude discussion I made earlier).
Despite this, the firearm homicide rate is 13x higher in the US.
I don't think it will get me anywhere in this, but using the only data I have (the Canadian study in my first post), there seems to be a relationship between:
a) the number of guns and the number of homicides
b) the number of guns and the number of non-gun homicides (take from this what you will)
c) an exponential relationship between the number of guns and the number of gun deaths (ie 1/3 the guns = 1/10 the gun deaths).
(I added the last 3 columns - note Switzerland has some apparently screwy stats!)
Therefore, I contend that less guns = good, more guns = bad.
If it is a deeper social issue (ie you guys like to kill each other and guns is a convenient way of expediting this - by extension if there were fewer guns there would be more knifings?), then I consider that a truely serious social problem... and one I am obviously not able to comment on.