counting by household is blatantly spinning the data to ignore households with more than one gun. why should we do that? even just households with two guns are not crazy outliers and vastly change the comparison.
also the US cannot require gun registration so we really have no idea how many guns are actually out there. only about 1 million guns are registered. 400 million seems to be the low estimate but could even be over 500 million. on the other hand the vast majority of finland’s firearms are registered.
also what kind of guns are we talking about? iirc Finns get a standard issue rifle for military service. Handguns are more often used in crime (and probably suicide).
Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?
The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.
The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.
counting by household is blatantly spinning the data to ignore households with more than one gun. why should we do that? even just households with two guns are not crazy outliers and vastly change the comparison.
also the US cannot require gun registration so we really have no idea how many guns are actually out there. only about 1 million guns are registered. 400 million seems to be the low estimate but could even be over 500 million. on the other hand the vast majority of finland’s firearms are registered.
also what kind of guns are we talking about? iirc Finns get a standard issue rifle for military service. Handguns are more often used in crime (and probably suicide).
Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?
The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.
The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.