Consider just sampling methods. Any competent statistician will tell you that results within twice the margin of error of either end of the value range (such as 0% and 100%) are meaningless. Yet people cite a change from 2% to 4% (or the reverse) as important, when the margin of error is 3%. This is utter nonsense.
All of the crime statistics cited reflect changing methods of data collection from one report to another, and collection methods with margins of error of 10% or more. Within such protocols, no results indicating a change of less than 20% can be responsibly cited as sufficiently significant to guide policy.
With numbers of crimes less than 200, the appropriate methodology is to investigate each and every one of those crimes and elicit the causative factors involved in each. Only after the crimes are examined in detail will it be useful to try to identify common causative patterns. With numbers that low, a single gang turf war, triggered by an attack on one member of one gang, can skew the entire statistical field, when in fact that conflict was little affected by public policy other than the collecting of statistics.
I have done some of that kind of investigation myself, just out of curiosity, and have come to the following general conclusions:
1. "Gun control" laws have almost no effect on crimes, one way or another, other than the crimes of possession of guns.
2. "Gun control" laws have almost no effect on the availability of guns, other than to those few people who willingly obey the laws, and they are few and growing fewer. The old slogan that "When guns are outlawed only outlaws with have guns" is a more accurate summary of the field than any official statistics.
3. The availability of guns has very little effect on the frequency of crimes. If someone is bent on committing a crime, they will, whether they have a gun or not.
4. The only discernible benefit of "gun control" laws, if it can be called that, is as a tool for law enforcement officials to prosecute persons they can't prove committed a crime, but which they either find in possession of a firearm, or plant one on him. The practice of planting weapons, narcotics, and other possession-prohibited items by police on otherwise innocent persons is very high, and in some jurisdictions may actually exceed the numbers of cases in which the alleged offender was actually in possession on his own initiative.
5. The advocacy of "gun control" laws is mainly driven by demands by law enforcement organizations that seek an environment in which only they are armed, they can arrest and prosecute anyone possessing a firearm, especially those they suspect of being criminal but can't prove it.
6. There is a hidden but real agenda within the law enforcement community to achieve a monopoly on law enforcement activities, excluding civilians, and especially civilian oversight that might identify their abuses. To put it bluntly, they don't want civilians making arrests, because that makes the police look ineffective, and threatens the officers with being arrested themselves, by civilians, when they commit crimes. One can see this in how difficult law enforcement organizations make it for law enforcement officers to arrest another officer when that officer commits a crime. They are required not to arrest, but to report to an "internal affairs" department, which usually just buries the case. They don't want civilians to begin doing what they don't allow their own to do.
7. Law enforcement organizations everywhere, not just in the United States, have tended to become tribes unto themselves, bonded to one another, and opposed to the rest of the world. The result is a culture of law enforcement that no longer sees its role as to "protect and serve" the public, but to protect and serve each other, their superiors, and the political class they are a part of. They are being transformed from militia into praetorians.
8. The first main way to effectively reduce violent crime is to revive the traditional militia system, engaging the majority of civilians to do law enforcement on a part-time, unpaid basis, and to reduce the role of professional law enforcement organizations to supporting roles for the militia, such as forensic and data analysis.
9. The second main way to reduce violent crime is to decriminalize narcotics and other kinds of possession and marketing activities. The overwhelming cause of crimes of violence is narcotics trafficking.
10. The third main way to reduce violent crime is to find ways to reduce the stress of modern urban life and the environmental factors, such as high levels of lead and other pollutants, that make people susceptible to losing control and turning to violence.
11. The fourth main way to reduce violent crime is to put children in high risk families into military-style boarding schools where they will receive adequate discipline and education, be exposed to better role models, and not be left to roam wild and get into trouble.
12. Public policy is excessively dominated by simplistic mental models of the behavior of complex social and economic systems. In the real world, those systems operate with an intricate network of feedback loops that make it likely that the simplest, most obvious way to intervene is most likely to have the opposite result from the one intended. Computer simulation modeling can help us avoid making some serious mistakes in such interventions, but no model can reliably allow us to manage social problems with any certainty. The only conclusion we can reach is that most of the things government can try do about them will be counterproductive. Government can fight wars and provide courts, but it should not be engaged in trying to do much else. See the article at http://www.constitution.org/ps/cbss.htm
Everyone would like a cheap solution, like "gun control", but there is none, and imagining there is won't make it so.
-- Jon
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