On Switzerland and Honduras

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Hi all. I'm making this thread because I want to address a common complaint that gun enthusiasts have been making online lately.

"Switzerland has a lot of guns and they have a very low murder rate. Honduras has strong gun control and they have a very high murder rate. What gives?"

I think that we should analyse both countries in order to get to the root of this conundrum.

http://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-of-gun-deaths-2018-2
^^^
According to this article, Switzerland isn't quite as gun crazy as people claim. Gun are kept away from people who are mentally unstable. Most Swiss gun owners keep guns to protect the country, not just for recreation. Switzerland has a lot of guns, but responsible gun ownership is legally enforced.

Additionally, the Swiss government cares for its citizens. Swiss people are guaranteed free healthcare and people who can't afford private healthcare aren't labeled "slackers". A brutal "dog eat dog" system is bad for your mental health. This is one of the main reasons why so many American snap. When you live in an economic system that rewards sociopathic selfishness and ridicules the poor, some people are going to lose faith in humanity.

Now let's look at Honduras.

Does Honduras have gun control? Yes, but it isn't as strict as you may think. In Honduras, it is still legal to own, sell and purchase firearms, though open carry is banned in some parts of the country.

Additionally, Honduras has very strict drug laws. Thus, many murders are carried out by members of the illegal drug trade. The murder rate in Honduras skyrocketed after these strict drug laws were introduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia

Additionally, Honduras is similar to the United States in that the government expects people to "man up" and pay for their own healthcare.

Leftism wins again.

So lack of socialism causes gun murders?

Well ... we need to get into definitions before we go any further, since socialism is so hard to define.

Some people claim that universal health care is a form of socialism. Other people claim that a country can not be considered socialist until the means of production are communally owned by the workers.

It is true that democratic countries with a proper social safety net (I.E. social democracies) have a very low murder rate and a very high standard of living overall.

If we were to use a stricter definition of socialism, the Soviet Union wouldn't even count because the means of production were owned by the state, not the proletariat.

The Soviet Union even had its own currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble

Ok riddle me this. In England, gun laws were extremely liberal a century and change ago, there were almost no restrictions on ownership. The police were unarmed and guns were everywhere in private hands. The murder rate was tiny, by firearm or other methods. England in those days was about as far from socialist as a country can be. What was going on there?

Some British police are authorized to carry and use firearms.

There was a lot of crime in London during the industrial era. Street gangs were everywhere. There were fewer crimes overall, but that's just because the overall population was lower.

Are you forgetting about Jack the Ripper? He was murdering women in Britain a little more than a century ago.

I was referring to police at the time. There are crime statistics available, they are not perfect, but there is an obvious trend.

Reported crimes (absolute figures) looks something like this, an increase that can't be explained by population increase:

More specific proportional violent crimes looks something like this:

There is a definite trend, I think you'd agree. Before you get excited about the homicide rate, that would be a lot higher if medicine and emergency access to it had not improved greatly over the last 50 years. The violent crime rate is more telling.

For some reference, the NHS was founded in 1948, the welfare state a few years before and Tony Blair's social program spending spree started in 1997.

The dips in recent years are interesting, no one is quite sure what they are. Could it be that finally socialist policy is returning us to a crime rate only 100 times higher than seen in pre-WW1 Britain? To take a more sceptical view, you might notice the dip roughly coincides with a change to the way crime stats were recorded. But the jury is still out I think.

Liberal gun laws caused a lunatic to go stabbing prostitutes for attention.