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There is no question that a drunk 20 year old who feels humiliated will pull out his gun and do something avoidable and regrettable.



No, that's wrong. Drunk 20 year olds who feel humiliated almost never pull out a gun, much less do anything with one. You have to get to really large sample sizes (big urban cities) to find that much at all.

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The US experience is about eight times as high. Is it because you like killing each other more than we do? Of course not - It occurs because there are too many guns floating around and drunk idiots use them to settle disputes.



Guns are almost never used to settle disputes. Where do you get the idea that they are? Very few people will see anyone pull a gun in anger in their entire lives. I think you watch too many Westerns.

You came closer to the issue at first: there are chunks of the population that just don't care, that didn't have dad drill into them respect and values (because they had no dad). I suspect the correlations get far stronger when you analyze the person holding the gun - did he have a dad? Did that dad spend fewer than five years of his children's lives in prison? That sort of thing.

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The Harvard Injury Control Research Center collects statistics and scholarly articles on gun violence. The bottom line is that states with higher levels of gun ownership have higher levels of gun violence - full stop.



They are citing their own papers to support themselves, and some of those were published in rather fringe publications. And I'd want to see their qualifications & funding too. Are any of the papers peer-reviewed? Paper #2 looks best, but I'd sure like to see their "controls" - you can make a survey say anything you want using "controls" and sample bias.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock