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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:44
The Truth About Gun Control
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Hey!
I've got a great idea.
Why don't we get some actual facts into the mix when it comes to gun control?
Because the amount of lying, falsehoods, misinformation, sophistry, and whatnot in the gun control debate is truly staggering, if not downright of biblical proportions.
We're going to cut through All of that clutter with some original research that will show you the actual facts about gun control.
And, when you see the actual facts about gun control, you'll see why nobody wants to talk about it.
But let's dive straight in to the data.
So, in gun control, a litmus test of somebody's honesty when discussing the data is whether they talk about homicides or gun deaths.
Now, gun deaths, of course, are any death that results from the use of a gun.
As you can see from this chart, 2012 data, 62% of gun deaths in the United States are suicides.
Hmm.
That seems quite important.
Only 35% of them are homicides.
Mixing these two together is lying.
And, of course, that's quite a lot of what occurs in this area.
Suicides, of course, doing unto yourself.
Homicides doing unto others.
If doing to yourself is exactly the same as doing unto others, I was a total stud in junior high school.
That's why I got carpal tunnel syndrome.
So, uh, no.
Maybe you say, well, let's ban guns so that there are fewer suicides, because they're used a lot in suicides.
Well, the data denies you there.
I'm afraid you are fact blocked.
In the United States, 51% of suicides are achieved with a firearm, 24% by hanging or suffocation.
Now, in the United Kingdom, where handguns are generally banned, only 2% of suicides are achieved through firearms, but 60% through hanging Or suffocation.
Just think of society like a balloon.
You push in one end, the other end just bulges out.
Get rid of guns, people will kill themselves some other way.
Aha!
You may say, but the United Kingdom has only half the suicide rate of the United States.
That is true.
However, if we go to South Korea, which has the second highest suicide rate in the world, and where handguns are banned, People kill themselves 60% of the time using pesticides, so it doesn't really matter.
People who want to kill themselves are going to find a way to kill themselves.
Otherwise, it's BAN BRIDGES!
And then we've got to get very wet.
So, let's look at how criminals get guns.
See, if you make guns illegal, people who don't follow the law might still get a hold of them.
Why do people even need to ask this question?
Hey, remember how they banned marijuana and how it's impossible to get marijuana and therefore there is no such thing as a Cheech and Chong film?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
They can't even keep drugs out of prisons.
You turn all of society into a prison, people are still going to find a way to get what they want.
So this was a survey of inmates and firearm sources.
40% came from illegal sources.
That's theft, a drug dealer off the street, a black market and so on.
37.4% of inmates got their gun from family or friend.
Because, you know, what kind of friend are you if you let your criminal friend wander around unarmed?
A bad friend, I guess.
11.3% got those through a legal purchase.
In other words, they went through a background check.
0.8% got them from gun shows where background checks are usually not performed.
And 11.2% got them from other.
So... You're really not going to do much good by banning guns.
Let's look at Australia.
In 1996, the Australian government introduced very strict gun control legislation after two things.
One, a massacre in Tasmania, and two, realizing that most people there are descended from criminals.
So, let's take them away.
Now, firearm homicides did decline sharply immediately afterwards, but overall, homicide rates did not change until 2001, when they began to trend downwards as part of a worldwide trend of a reduction of this kind of violence.
Now, as you can see from the graph, as firearm use in homicides declined, the use of knives and other sharp objects increased.
Now, shockingly, there is pretty good data to suggest that you're about as likely to die from a knife wound as you are from a gunshot wound.
Especially handguns, they're pretty small.
So, yeah, it doesn't really solve the problem.
You just get more knives and sharp instruments being used to kill people rather than firearms.
Now, according to the theory, more guns is more crime, and therefore if we want to reduce crime, less guns.
Okay?
Let's put that to the test.
It's not really a very complicated test, but we'll do it anyway.
U.S.
homicide rate from 1994 to 2012 declines from 9 to a little under 5.
So that must mean that the number of guns has been declining enormously, right?
No!
Way more guns now than there were in 1994, And a far lower homicide rate.
So according to one estimate, 286 million guns in the U.S.
in 2011.
Other estimates place that as high as 334 million, which is more guns than people.
So this data should give anyone pause when it comes.
I'm not saying this is a correlation.
Nobody's saying there's direct causation here.
There are arguments that the more prevalent their guns are, the less safe criminals feel and the fewer crimes are committed.
And there are estimates that say All right.
that as many as 2.5 million crimes in the U.S. are prevented because people are armed.
But this should give you pause if you think that reducing guns will automatically reduce homicides, because there seems to be some other factor at play here.
All right.
If we think that more guns is more homicides, let's look at the top states by murder rates.
Let's count the District of Columbia as a state rather than the center of evil.
So let's compare gun ownership.
This is from 2002.
So the national average gun ownership percentage is 32.6 percent of people.
Murder rate per 100,000, 5.64.
of people, murder-rape 100,005.64.
Now, the District of Columbia has very, very few guns, and it's only 5.2% gun ownership, which is way, way less.
And that's six times less than the national average.
So therefore the murder rate should be totally low.
According to the theory, not the case.
The murder rate is far higher in the district of Columbia than it is nationally.
Um, eight times, nine times higher, despite a 5.2% gun ownership percentage.
It's a 46.2 murder rate per 100,000.
percentage, it's a 46.2 motor rate per 100,000.
Louisiana, boy that's high gun ownership, 45.6.
Oh, murder rate, much lower than the District of Columbia, which has a much lower firearm, or gun ownership rate, 13.2.
Maryland, 22.1%.
Gun ownership, 9.4% homicide.
Mississippi, 54.3% gun ownership.
2.1% gun ownership, 9.4% homicide. Mississippi, 54.3% gun ownership.
Hey, the frogs aren't going to shoot themselves.
And 9.2% murder rate.
Nevada, 31.5% gun ownership, murder rate per 100,000, 8.3%.
And if you take out the back alleys behind casinos, that's a lot lower.
New Mexico, 39.6% gun ownership, 8.3% murder rate.
Illinois, 19.7% gun ownership, 7.5% murder rate.
South Carolina, 45% gun ownership rate, 7.3% murder rate.
Tennessee, 46.4% to 7.2%.
Arizona, 36.2% to 7.1%.
7.7 gun ownership, 7.5% murder rate.
South Carolina, 45% gun ownership rate, 7.3% murder rate, 7.3, sorry, murder rate for 100,000.
Tennessee, 46.4 to 7.2, Arizona, 36.2 to 7.1.
So as you can see, no particular correlation.
So, Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 banned Washington, D.C.
residents from owning handguns, automatic firearms, and high-capacity semi-automatic firearms.
About ten years later, crime in D.C.
began to skyrocket, and by the 1990s, the area became known as the murder capital of the United States.
Now, of course, there was a crack epidemic in the 80s, but here we see there's a firearm ban, doesn't seem to have much to do with the murder rate, and then the murder rate skyrockets despite the firearm ban.
Hmm, something else at play here.
As to why the murder rate began to decline, In the nineties, well, there's a number of arguments, stronger sentencing and not letting criminals out.
You know, in the 1960s, there was kind of a revolving door policy put in by the leftists, which was, you know, well, criminals are victims and it's socioeconomic status and Marxist economic determinism.
So let's let the poor people out, the poor criminals out.
And therefore they went and committed more crimes.
Also, there's an argument to be made that the legalization, of abortion in the 1970s, 16 to 20 years later, produced far fewer feral young men raised in fatherless homes and therefore much higher propensity towards criminality.
So, it doesn't really matter.
Murder rate and gun ownership by state.
That's all the states and the murder rate.
And gun ownership percentage on the Y-axis here, the higher the gun ownership, you'd expect the higher the murder rate.
It's not the case.
There's a slightly negative Correlation.
So 1.0 is a perfect correlation.
Minus 1.0 is a perfectly negative correlation.
Zero is no correlation at all.
This is basically zero.
There's no relationship between gun ownership by state and the murder rates.
So reducing gun ownership will have no particular effect on the murder rate.
I wonder if there's another correlation.
Yes!
I think there is.
Hang on to your hats.
Firearm murder rate and gun ownership by state.
So, gun ownership and firearm murder rate.
So even when there are lots of guns, are guns used to kill people?
Not really.
Correlation of mine is 0.07.
Nothing particularly significant.
So this is not the pattern that we're looking for, Stormtrooper.
Let's compare Baltimore, Maryland, sorry, Baltimore, Memphis, and Portland.
So the national average, 4.5 per 100 2014 Baltimore had a murder rate of 33.8 for 100,000.
Now Maryland has very strict gun control laws.
Very high murder rate.
The same year Memphis also had a murder rate of 21.4 compared to the 4.5 national average.
Now Tennessee gun control laws are a lot less restrictive compared to Maryland.
Murder rate is also very high, close to four times the national average.
Portland, 4.2.
Murder rate which is even below the national average for 100,000.
Oregon's gun control laws are not particularly different from Tennessee.
Why is there such a big difference?
Could it be that gun control policies have very little effect on murder rates?
A CDC analysis The results were all over the place.
So, if you're trying to control guns, you will not be able to control murder.
to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence.
The results were all over the place.
So, if you're trying to control guns, you will not be able to control murder.
But there's another factor.
Brace yourself, it's coming.
Let's look at homicide rates by race.
This may shock you, this may appal you, please don't shoot the messenger, these are just the facts.
And we're talking about races because races or ethnicities act in a different way, so we have to talk about them in a different way.
And we don't want to be averse to facts and numbers, do we?
That would be psychotic and insane.
So, per 100,000 People, 16.27 homicide rates among blacks, 5.24 among Hispanics, 1.74 among whites, and 0.95% among Asians.
So blacks have well over nine times the homicide rate of whites, Hispanics about three times, and of course Asians a little more than half.
This is from 2014.
The numbers were fairly obscure prior to that because until 2013 crime statistics tended to blend Hispanics in with whites.
Now that has been broken out.
So let's look at the top 10 cities by murder rate.
Earlier we were talking about gun ownership versus murder rate.
Here we'll talk about top 10 cities by murder rate.
We'll look at the black population as a percentage and the murder rate per 100,000.
Now, The national average for the black population, about 13% of the US population, again, murder rate per 100,000, 2014, 4.5.
St.
Louis, 49% black and 49.9 per 100,000 murder rate.
Well, that's more than 10 times, that's very high.
Detroit, 83% black, 43.5.
Murder rate, New Orleans, 60% black, 38.8.
per 100,000 murder rate.
Well, that's more than 10 times that's very high.
Detroit, 83% black, 43.5.
Murder rate, New Orleans, 60% black, 38.8.
64% black in Baltimore, and a 33.8 murder rate, 52% black, Newark, New Jersey, 33.3 murder rate.
So there seems to be a bit more of a correlation there.
Birmingham, Alabama, 73% black, 24.5 murder rate.
Buffalo, New York, 39% black, 23.2 murder rate.
rate Buffalo, New York, 39% black, 23.2 murder rate.
55% black in Baton Rouge, 23.1 murder rate.
In Pittsburgh, 26% black, 22.4 murder rates, possibly the worst of all.
Memphis, Tennessee, 63% black, 21.4 murder rate.
Pittsburgh recorded 66 killings in 2014.
That's more than any year since 2008 when the officials counted 79.
A lot of this, according to officials, is in the drug trade.
More evidence of heroin and cheap drug use and cheap drug sales on the street.
Of the 66 homicide victims in the city, 59 were black and only 7 were white.
And this is not in any way hostile towards the black population, of course, given that 90% of the murders committed by blacks or other blacks were actually here in the realm of Black Lives Matter, but we have to start talking about the facts and the truth in order to begin solving the problem.
People say, ah, you see, but it's because blacks are disproportionately high in their gang membership and that's why there's this high murder rate.
Well, it certainly is true that blacks and Hispanics are, let's just say, disproportionately represented among gang members.
Hispanics have a higher rate of gang membership than blacks.
Hispanics hovering between 45 and 50 percent, blacks between 30 and just under 40 percent in terms of This is the proportion of gang members by race.
Whites hovering around 10%.
Now Hispanics, I don't know why they're higher.
My guess would be, you know, Spanish-speaking connections through Mexico, tunnels under the border, and so on.
A lot of human trafficking, some drug trafficking, and so on.
And so it is not because blacks are disproportionately represented in gangs that we have such a high murder rate.
It's something else.
Now, it certainly is true that use of firearms is incredibly common in gang-related homicides, but remember Hispanics have a much lower homicide rate than blacks, despite being more in gangs.
Gangs are responsible, according to FBI data, for an average of 48% of violent crime in most jurisdictions and up to 90% in several others.
However, according to the United States National Gang Center, which tranks Gang related homicides account for only 13% of all homicides annually.
So blacks can't be because of gang membership, because their gang membership is lower than Hispanic, and gang homicides don't contribute that much to the national average.
So, this is all original research, this part, and it comes from listener donations.
So if you find this information valuable, if you appreciate the clarity we're bringing to this topic, please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate so we can continue to help out communities in trouble by bringing the facts of their difficulties to the general public.
So this is the data set for this slide and the following slides.
All cities with populations over 200,000 that have FBI crime data available.
So here on the y-axis, that's the one on the left going upy-downy, the population of the city that is white, the percentage of the population that is white, from zero to, I guess, 90% is the high end, and the murder rate.
And so here we can see a negative correlation.
In other words, the more whites who live in a city, the lower the murder rate tends to become.
That's a pretty significant correlation.
So now we're starting to get somewhere in terms of data that actually has correlations.
Motor rate and Hispanic population.
By city, there is a mildly negative correlation of minus point one six.
Now, given that Hispanics have a higher motor rate than whites, it's hard to know exactly why this is the case.
I await your comments and questions below.
But here, the more Hispanics are in the city, the lower the motor rate.
It could be because they're pushing out blacks who have a higher motor rate.
It's hard to say, but this is the fact.
And now, The not so deadly Chinatown, the murder rate in Asian population by city, a negative correlation of minus 0.27.
In other words, the more Asians who live in your city, the fewer murders you are likely to experience, which of course we would expect given that they have a very, very low murder rate.
So here we see the things which negatively correlate with murder.
The more Hispanics and whites and Asians who are living in your city, the lower your murder rate will generally tend to become.
Now we come to the launchpad of tragedy.
This is the murder rate in black population by city.
See, now we're starting to get some data that we can begin to use to make appalling, horrified, yet intelligent and informed decisions about how to solve problems related to gun violence.
The correlation between the black population in the city and the murder rate is 0.77.
That is extremely high.
That is extremely high.
And here you can see, as the black population as a percentage of the city goes up, the murder rate goes up as well.
And this explains, of course, things like Asian flight and Jewish flight and white flight and so on, is that generally when the blacks move into the neighborhood, again, the majority of blacks Very nice people, law abiding, and so on.
However, there is a toxicity to the black culture that has been, of course, identified by people like Tom Sowell and Walter Williams and Shelby Steele and so on, where they point out that there is a toxic, anti-learning, anti-assimilation, hatred of the dominant class structure and What is called institutionalized racism.
So there's a hostility towards the dominant culture.
There is a massive amounts of single motherhood.
Close to three quarters of black kids are born outside of wedlock and that is associated strongly with increased criminality.
So for whatever reason, and we're going to delve more into this in our presentation, the truth about crime, but for whatever reason right now, these are the facts that the higher the population of blacks in a city, the higher the murder rate becomes in a very, or at least significantly linear fashion.
Oh, it's poverty, you say.
See, it's the poor people, and because poverty, therefore crime.
No, this is the go-to position for people who wish to avoid uncomfortable facts, but it is false.
The correlation between murder and the poverty rate from 1960 to 2014 is minus .44.
In other words, as poverty goes down, the murder rate goes up.
This is the exact opposite of everything that people talk about.
Let me say this again.
It's really important to understand.
As the poverty rate declines, the murder rate goes up.
If you look back in the past, when the poverty rate was hovering around 22 percent, murder rate was less than 5.
Now we've got poverty 8 to 12 percent, 10 to 12 percent, we've got a murder rate of 10 plus in general.
So this is the exact opposite of what everyone is told.
And the reasons for this, this is not causal, right?
It's not like if you make more people poor, the crime rate will go down.
That's not necessarily proven in this.
It could be a commonality with other factors.
So in the 1960s, the welfare state came in and The welfare state promoted single motherhood.
Single motherhood promotes criminality.
So that could be as the poverty rate declines as a result of government payments to single mothers, the criminality goes up because the children of single mothers are much more likely to become criminals.
So there, of course, as the welfare state came in, there was leniency towards criminals.
And so that may be another co-joining factor.
So this is a correlation.
This is not proof of causation.
However, the argument that we simply give more money to poor people and they'll stop committing crimes, not only is that kind of like a shakedown, like let's pay you to not commit crimes, it's kind of like what the mafia does when they threaten to burn down your restaurant, but it is not borne out by the facts.
And all you have to do is look at the crime rate of Appalachia, a section of America with significantly lower incomes, and realize that their murder rate is very low as well.
Violent crime and poverty rate.
The correlation here is even more strong, but negative.
So as the poverty rate declines, the violent crime rate increases.
Increases minus 0.52.
Again, this is 1960 to 2014.
So simply saying, well, if we reduce the poverty rate, we will reduce the crime.
No, it's not uncorrelated.
It is negatively correlated.
The lower the poverty rate, the higher the violent crime.
It's even worse for property crime and poverty rates.
As the poverty rate declines, property crime shoots through the roof.
The correlation is minus 0.59.
That is staggeringly, appallingly horrible.
So this compares overall property crime rates and poverty for each year between 1960 and 2014.
So the normal places, the natural places where people look for answers with regards to gun violence and gun control are false, are incorrect.
Now, of course, you may be asking yourself, what is the answer?
Well, we're working on it, and we're putting together a presentation, The Truth About Crime, where we go into, we have some tentative theses, which we're working on trying to get out to you, but again, we rely on your donations, freedomainradio.com, slash donate to help us out.
I mean, let's just talk honesty.
Everybody says, well, we want a real conversation about gun control.
We want real conversations about race.
But then when you bring data, some people are like, oh no, too much reality.
Well, sorry, but we need to bring facts because we need people to have the correct information when they are talking about things like gun control.
America does not have a problem with gun control.
America, it seems, has a problem with violence within the black community and within the Hispanic community, but good job Asians at not shooting people.
Now, of course, I, like you, like every other decent person in the world, wants less violence, less crime, less homicides, fewer thefts, and so on.
But that requires that we first address where the problems are really occurring, which is in the black community, to a large degree, in the United States.
And there's lots of black leaders who agree with me, so these are just facts.
We do want fewer black bodies hitting the floor.
Hiding the relationship between blacks and crime is even worse than hiding the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
Because smoking you do to yourself.
But you think of these poor black kids who are shot in drive-by shootings and gang violence and so on.
Have to grow up with bars in the windows and so on.
It is a tragic and horrifying life.
And it's not just because of poverty.
There are other issues at play.
Toxic culture has been identified by a lot of black intellectuals as to why.
There's so much violence in the black community.
Single motherhood is another factor that's been identified by a wide variety of thinkers.
There are other factors which we're going to work in our next presentation.
So the reality is that gun control is an illusion.
It's an illusion currently masked by a deception in that everyone pretending is pretending that everyone in America is somehow the same, but gun control is an illusion.
There is nobody, who is for gun control in any kind of absolute fashion.
This is something I wrote years ago, which I stand by as strongly, if not more strongly now, than when I first wrote it.
If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm the people.
So it's not that you are anti-gun.
You need the police's guns to take away other people's guns.
So you are very pro-gun.
You just believe that only the government, which is of course so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous, should be allowed to have guns.
There is no such thing as gun control.
There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.
And if you think that is a safe approach to take, I've got a quarter of a billion dead people in the 20th century alone, outside of war, murdered by their own governments.
Almost exclusively after having been disarmed first.
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