Greg Burch writes:
>> ... Relaxing [gun crime] laws does reduce the murder rate, just
>> as increasing the number of cops, but that's still a small change compared
>> to social factors which can make one area a hundred times as dangerous ...
>Setting aside the unfortunately inflammatory rhetoric that's been lobbed by
>participants in this and associated threads, this looks to me like the most
>sensible and lucid comment in the whole discussion.
Of course continuing this line of reasoning, we should observe that murder rates are a very small contribution to mortality rates. But people seem much more interested in talking about murder than about other mortality causes (e.g. no response to my "Why Do We Die?" thread). Similarly, people are much more interested in talking about gun laws than other influences on crime.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-2627