Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: Why "Chicago" is a Bad Gun-Rights Argument [View all]petronius
(26,602 posts)He's not claiming that gun control has reduced Chicago's overall violent crime rate - that ship has clearly sailed - it seems like he's suggesting that Chicago gun control has reduced rates of a specific sub-set of homicides. Specifically, he's ignoring gang-, drug-, and other-crime-related murders, and just focusing on domestic and workplace violence, so-called crimes of passion committed by people without past records or other involvement in criminal behavior.
It sounds as though he thinks that these crimes are committed (semi-)spontaneously by people who would be likely to abide by Chicago's gun laws. Thus, if these crimes are occurring at a lower rate, it (hypothetically) must be because the city's gun control is working - some people who might have acted out violently didn't do so, because they obeyed the law and didn't have guns. It's not actually an illogical hypothesis, although I suspect it will be a factual and statistical fail (and google-science-guesswork is a complete joke, of course).
Obviously, there are a bunch of huge assumptions here: the first being that these specific crimes really are less common in Chicago, and the second being that, if the first is true, it must be because of gun laws. The second assumption can't even be dealt with until we have numbers to go with the first assumption...