Remark about the usual policy/mind-killer issue: Your comment might provoke defensive reactions from gun control proponents who may object to your implicit identification of gun control with total ban on all guns. Since it may be good to avoid accusations of strawmanning, I'd suggest to stick to the original post's suggestion to keep one level meta: that is to say what sort of evidence is relevant rather than to present concrete pieces of evidence.
That said, I miss a part analysing the relation between market value of arms and utility from having them, mostly related to value change which can happen after the ban.
For illustration, see how absence of such considerations renders the analysis visibly faulty for a slightly different problem (all numbers in the following are made up):
Abusing heroin causes death of 1,000 people in a year. Assume (very generously) that it is possible to implement an effective heroin ban which would remove all abuse. The value of life of an average person is 7 million, but it is much lower for a typical addict, say 3 million. Accounting for future deaths by 10% rate makes this 10,000 lives times 3 million which is 30 billion. Now, the present market value of all heroin in the world is 35 billion. Therefore, we shouldn't implement the ban.
Your comment might provoke defensive reactions from gun control proponents who may object to your implicit identification of gun control with total ban on all guns.
Which is conveniently much harder to do such analysis on. Given how outrageously pro-gun-ban many of my assumptions are (e.g. I assume all the gun murders magically stop, with no substitution effect. 2nd Amendment advocates argue there would be an increase in murders!).
...I'd suggest to stick to the original post's suggestion to keep one level meta: that is to say what sort of evidence is re
I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.
So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.
My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.
Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?
That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?
As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn't happen here."
At that point I realized that I don't know, even in theory, how to tell what the answer to my question is, or what evidence would be strong evidence for one position or the other. I am not strong enough as a rationalist or a statistician.
So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)
Have at.
-Robin