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Kingoftheinternet comments on Gun Control: How would we know? - Less Wrong Discussion
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My strategy in these cases is usually "look for lots of facts relevant to this issue and see what stands out". The things that jump out at me from just that page:
The relative lack of facts that would justify stronger gun control laws on that site makes me suspicious, but I don't see anything wrong with the cited sources for any of these specific numbers.
Obvious confounding to the last fact: How many of those "someone would have died" situations would somebody actually have died in? That seems a number strongly prone to overestimation. (Of course, it's a bigger number even if you put a 90% bullshit discount on, but it's something to keep in mind)
1st point: Regions experiencing a rise in violent crime are more likely to pass gun control laws, if the rate of rise stays approximately the same this would be evidence that gun control laws do not affect crime one way or the other.
2nd/4th point: DOJ reports approximately 20k gun deaths per year that aren't suicide. Of 8 separate studies on use of firearms by private citizens to prevent crime, the lowest number was 200k/year. This was from the study based only on police reports.
This also seems like a place that needs close attention to the regression fallacy. If especially high crime rate areas tend to change their gun control laws (either direction!) and then crime rates improve, that could be regression instead of cause and effect.
That could definitely apply to a lot of the examples they presented. I'm still mystified by Washington D.C.: they already had a higher murder rate than the US average, then handguns were banned in 1975, then their murder rate tripled while the national average stayed fairly flat, then their murder rate came back down to its mid-70s level in the late 2000s, then the handgun ban was struck down. My current favored conclusion from that is "gun control laws themselves just don't matter very much, and are dwarfed by other social and cultural forces."
Even that isn't a great measure-- social changes aren't constrained by anything to rise at the same rate.
re: 4: I am skeptical that the fraction of reported self-defense situations in which "someone would have died" are actually situations in which someone would have died is 100%. I would ballpark it at 25%-50%, but I wouldn't be terribly shocked by any number in the range 10%-150%. Citation definitely needed on this one, especially as my "reasonable range" is wide enough to cover everything from net positive to net negative.
They explain how they found that number here. I'm pretty impressed with their methodology, though I'm also sure you have a point about people exaggerating their chances of dying regardless of what clever study authors do.
1) What fraction of people are visibly armed with a gun?
2) Does that simply result in concentrating the criminals onto the other 92%?
EDITED TO EXPLAIN: I misread this as committed [i]against[/i] someone visibly armed. So this was extra-confusing. Of course, I should have noticed that and gone back and been more careful.
1) Almost zero, of course. How should that affect our interpretation of that fact?
I don't understand what you mean by the second question.