1/ I haven't gone all the way through this BJ Campbell piece, so this isn't an unqualified endorsement, but it's worth taking a look at.medium.com/@bjcampbell/th… It also helps make sense of something in the Australian data
When Australia launched its big gun control push in the wake of Port Arthur, gun deaths were already on the decline and had been for a while. But they decline seems to have gotten a small push from the ban:
And no, that drop didn't come from mass shootings, since those were always super rare in Oz. () As best I recall, it's arguably from a drop in suicides. There is a lot of debate around the Australian suicide data re: "replacement" and so on..
But this Campbel article points out that suicides of professional-aged men are far and away the biggest contributor to gun deaths, and that their odds of killing themselves go way up if there's a gun around. This apparently isn't true for women, who will sub in whatever method.
So if Campbell's parsing of the US data is correct about this, that taking guns away from professional-aged (20's to 60's) would have a massive impact on gun death numbers, and if Australia is culturally similar enough to the US, then there's probably a good case...
..that the ban some number of Australian men's lives. Probably not a huge number. Again, there is a large literature around the Australian case, and regardless of what you read on the Internet from some guy at Johns Hopkins, the case isn't really closed there.
*saved some number of Australian men's lives.
FWIW I have always found the idea that the Oz ban prevented some smallish number of suicides, where the victims would not have chosen a replacement method if they had no access to a gun, to be pretty convincing.
I'd guess that reinvigorating the middle class -- like, actually fixing insecurity and erosion of wealth, and not just goosing the stock market -- would save as many or more lives as a gun ban. citylab.com/equity/2015/02…
If I were king of the world I'd make a deal with gun grabbers: let's fix decline in middle-class wealth and real wages we've seen since the GFC, and if that doesn't save a ton of lives then we can talk about your thing.
