The National Academies just today announced Data on Firearms and Violence Too Weak to Settle Policy Debates.
The group that produced this work was composed of: The National Institute of Justice, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Joyce Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Except for the National Institute of Justice and the Annie E. Casey Foundation the other organizations have a long distinguished history of being very anti-gun. I had never heard of the the Annie E. Casey Foundation so I did a little research and found these pages on their web site indicating they are at least midly anti-gun:
http://www.aecf.org/tarc/resource/show.php?object=example&id=241&topic_id=20
http://www.aecf.org/kidscount/indicator_briefs/teen_death.pdf
Yet when these organizations looked closely they had to conclude:
current research and data on firearms and violent crime are too weak to support strong conclusions about the effects of various measures to prevent and control gun violence
Of course this doesn’t say “More Guns, Less Crime“. It merely says, “We don’t know what the effect of gun availability is on crime.“
If anyone, unless they are a top notch research scientist with unpublished work on this subject, continues to advocate gun control as a solution to reducing violent crime prior to new research coming out they are not only bigots, they are arrogant bigots.
And the bigot posting comments under the name of MAD here and here has clearly established his or her position near the top of the list of arrogant bigots.
“If anyone, unless they are a top notch research scientist with unpublished work on this subject, continues to advocate gun control as a solution to reducing violent crime prior to new research coming out they are not only bigots, they are arrogant bigots.”
Similarly, anyone who continues to advocate gun ownership as a solution to reducing violent crime prior to new research coming out must also be an arrogant bigot, surely?
In the general situation you could make that case. For specific cases, such as a violent ex-boyfriend vowing to kill “his” woman the odds change.
Or how about lunatic runs around shooting neighbors? Or arguement outside bar leaves three bystanders shot and killed?
In a well armed society the lunatic would have been stopped before very many neighbors have been visited by the lunatic. See the section on mass shootings in “More Guns, Less Crime”. Empirical evidence shows those type of events go to almost zero when people are allowed to defend themselves.
In the second case it depends on the circumstances. Usually, but not always, “situations” escalate slowly enough (over a period of at least five to ten seconds which is enough) that people know that things are likely to “get out of hand”. In a well armed society armed bystanders would have made themselves “ready” and either directly or indirectly (through body language) let the participants in the argument know it was not wise to escalate beyond a certain point.
When the perpetrator of a crime believes they are NOT the only one in the vicinity that is armed they are less likely to engage in “anti-social behavior” because of the likelihood of acquiring a sudden case of lead poisoning.
Just as if when a police officer is watching, violence crime is very unlikely to happen because the potential criminal knows there is someone there that is able to stop them. If they are a wolf in the middle of a pack of sheep, what do they have to worry about? Sheep dogs can kill sheep just as easily as wolves. That doesn’t mean that sheep dogs should be banned from contact with the flock. And so it is with gun owners. A certain percentage of them in the general population decreases the ability of the predators to prey on the weak.