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nyan_sandwich comments on Gun Control: How would we know? - Less Wrong
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With this kind of question that borders on political/identity issues, they very first thing you do is build your lines of retreat: If guns cause death, what should you do? If guns don't cause death, what should you do? If guns reduce death, what should you do? You need satisfactory non-straw answers for all of those cases before you are qualified to look at the facts. After you have those answers, you will find it much easier to be neutral.
I think you'd have to notice the (anti)correllation between gun control and violent death across countries/states/areas, if it exists, then look at the three hypotheses: guns cause death, death causes guns, something causes both. Try to eliminate hypotheses.
You could note that Canada has more guns per capita and less murder. You could control for the effect of legislation by finding different groups of people who kill each other with guns or don't who live in the same legislative areas. You could find a culturally homogenous group who are split by arbitrary political lines (i.e. toronto/detroit/buffalo/etc, that country that is split in two in the carribean). etc.
Canada actually has fewer guns per capita. The US is definitely topping that list.
Someone has been feeding me lies!
I believed it as well until recently. I first remember hearing it in "Bowling For Columbine" so maybe Michael Moore is the culprit. American having more guns per capita definably fits better with my my background beliefs of those two countries.
Or did you?
I Ctrl-Fed through a few versions of the English subtitles available for Bowling for Columbine to try to find a claim that Canada has more guns per capita than the US. I turned up a blank (although subtitles don't capture everything, of course).
The most relevant bits I found were subtitles 1580 to 1583:
That implies about 23 guns per 100 Canadians, which is if anything an underestimate.
Whoops, I guess my memory was being confabulatory.
Yeah, I think I got that from there too.
A more interesting number for the gun control debate is the percentage of households with guns. That number in the U.S. has been declining -- pdf, but it is still very high in comparison with other developed nations.
However, exact comparisons of gun ownership rates internationally are tricky. The data is often sparse or non-uniform in the way it is collected. The most consistent comparisons I could find -- and I'd love to see more recent data -- were from the 1989 and 1992 International Crime Surveys. The numbers are reported in this paper on gun ownership, homicide, and suicide -- pdf. These data are old, but in 1989, about 48% of U.S. households had a firearm of some kind, compared with 29% of Canadian households. However, the numbers for handguns specifically were very different. In 1989, only 5% of Canadian households had a handgun, compared with 28% of U.S. households.
By a factor of three. Whereas the number of firearm-related deaths... [looks it up] I'm surprised. Turns out that the average gun in Canada kills more people than the average gun in the US, though most of that is suicides. The average gun in the US does kill more people other than its user than the average gun in Canada, but it's within a factor of two.
If you look at long guns alone, or actual gun owners(instead of guns owned), the numbers are closer. The US is still definitely in the lead, though.
Point of order: I'm assuming that by "that country that is split in two in the carribean" you are referring to the island of Hispaniola, which is divided between the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which are not especially culturally homogenous (if your refering to a different carribean island, then ignore this).
I was referring to that one. I expected them to be culturally similar because that border is awful straight, but if they aren't, they aren't.
Do you know more about what the differences are and where they came from? Is it differences in political history? Different groups of people?
EDIT: Toronto and Detroit aren't all that similar either. I wonder where you could find a good case where legislation is the only difference between two populations.
Haiti and the Dominican have remarkably different political histories - Haiti has a lot more awful dictators in its past. They're poor comparisons. Toronto and Detroit are probably even worse - Detroit is an industrial centre whose industry rotted out around the same time as it was levelled(metaphorically) by race riots and people fleeing from them. Toronto is a financial and cultural centre whose primary challenge is that they're short a freeway or two and the commute times are bad. If you want to compare Toronto to anything, NYC or maybe Chicago are the obvious candidates.
As for a close cross-border comparison, I propose Seattle and Vancouver. They're close, similarly sized, and culturally close. You can also look at smaller examples(Sault Ste Marie ON/MI, Niagara Falls ON/NY, etc.), but it's harder to get good data from those due to scale, even though they are even closer in geographic and cultural terms.
North and South Korea just after the split is probably closest to what your looking for, though currently, they have 50 years of differing political histories separating them. Still probably better than most examples.
Both countries share a cultural inheritance from the native Taino people, but how much of that was able to escape post-contact ethnocide is a matter of debate. The two countires were united under first Spanish and then French colonial rule, but following the end of colonialism, the mainly Spanish-speaking east engaged in a hard fought war of independance from the French-speaking west. The "awful straight" border you noticed was the end result of this war.
In my limited-ish experience, some Canadian border towns (Niagra Falls, in particular) get pretty close, but you'll get lots of people on both sides that concentrate on their national identity.
I don't have clear lines of retreat for the simple reason that to answer what I would do in each of those cases requires also knowing what sorts of actions make things better in each case. I mean, I can say something generic like "increase or decrease the availability of guns in linear proportion to how much they help", but what actually decreases availability of guns, without having terrible side effects? Like, does gun control as we currently understand it lead to only crazy/criminal/insane people owning guns?, because that seems suboptimal.
Having said that, I feel pretty confident that I'm willing to follow the data here; I think I've dismantled my ego need to support my historical position pretty well over the last few days.