Stopped Motorist Shoots at Deputy...Deputy Handles It

I never said you personally were, but throughout several iterations of this debate on several threads it's been raised more than once. It's one of the standard explanations for gun culture and it wouldn't make sense to have the discussion without addressing it.

That being said the reason I'm addressing you directly is because you asked the question, nothing more significant than that really.

Yes, you do have more murders even once the gun related ones are discounted but that doesn't really matter to my point. The position I'm trying to explain is that the societal presence of guns seems to be linked to increased severity of violence when it occurs, resulting in more of those violent crimes becoming murders, not that guns are necessarily used as the murder weapon per se.

I don't have a satisfactory explanation for that link, just a couple of hypotheses, but at the risk of labouring the point it's hard to ignore the fact that the two developed nations with remarkably high murder rates just happen to be the two with permissive gun laws. That's a remarkable coincidence if the two facts aren't connected.

It could be psychological, exposure to lethal weapons may normalise the idea of lethal force, or it could be the very fact of guns potentially being used for self defense means attackers tend to be more inclined to be certain their target is incapacitated and unable to retaliate. It could be that in many cases the target did in fact draw a weapon and that in itself escalated the situation to lethality without the gun actually being the means.

I'm speculating here certainly, but doing so from the need to explain an observable phenomenon rather than pushing an ideological position. No matter what you, I, or anyone else, personally feel about guns there are clearly questions there to be answered.

Then why isn't that reflected in the numbers? In the UK, or France, or Japan, everyone is unarmed yet they stand far less chance of being murdered despite being at pretty much the same risk of being attacked. I do get your point, it seems very much common sense, but it isn't working out. If it were you'd expect the consequences of violent crimes would on average tend to be less severe, not more. The theory isn't working in the real world.

I played with a few jokey answers here but a quick fact check revealed what I suspected.

Sweden, like the UK, records crime differently to most countries. Like us their figures are based on reports of crimes, whereas most countries look later in the process, either at convictions or at least credible confirmation that a crime had in fact taken place. Additionally they record each instance of rape in particular as a discrete offence, whereas most countries will record repeated instances between the same parties as one single offence. Taking those facts into account it starts to look like Sweden might in fact be one of the safest places to live.

Sorry @Tuttle, but Germanys' head of state seems not to be the cause of Swedens' crime figures after all.

I have used a firearm to deter a crime. I was a passenger in a vehicle being harassed by a methed out truck driver. He was getting in front of us and slamming the brakes, getting beside us and trying to run us off the road. I flashed my carry pistol and he backed the hell off.

Glad to hear you're ok dude.

If there's one good thing for de-escalating road rage, it's waving a gun around.

Yeah, but if @TheBurgerKing didn't have a gun he would have just run the guy over wouldn't he?

Similar situation for me, except it wasn’t one guy, but a carload of them and I was alone. Road rage incident before that term was invented.

They hauled ass once the got a good look.

According to leftie journalist Tim Pool, a rare, actual, journalist who visited Sweden to see for himself, your analysis is wrong.

Start at 2:00 if you're short of time. Not a bad report from Tim.

"There are, in fact, places in the US where the income is so low and the location so rural, that hunting is simply the least difficult way to get meat." - Forbin

very true! And in Georgia (for example) the annual bag limit on deer is twelve - ten does and two bucks. So yeah if you have lived there a long time and have a lot of years of hunting under your belt and permission to hunt a variety of property? Your family will never run out of meat. And if you have wild hogs where you hunt? Endless....ENDLESS......bacon.

It's not my analysis, it's simply a report on Swedens' crime recording practices. Whilst I'm not doubting that there's honesty to Tims' video the fact he discusses it as a "new" phenomenon is interesting given my chart was seven years old but the peak of immigration into Sweden didn't come till 2015. Certainly there was an upsurge prior to that, but difficult to reconcile with third generation established migrants:



It definitely seems that there's a cultural problem going on (but be cautioned: when reading that article consider the TV station worked off convictions rather than following the official protocol of recording reports). The difficulty becomes how do we reconcile the sky high rates in one country with those of its' peers which seem to fare better despite having similar immigration policies? Of course your video offers one explanation, that Sweden historically did a singularly poor job of integrating communities, which should really be a lesson we are prepared to listen to. Immigration isn't the problem per se, poor integration policies are. I'm looking at several of the societal problems both the US and the UK have there.

My own suspicion is that the figures also tend to give us a glimpse into how wide the disparity is between offending and conviction rates for rape as a crime. If we were to look at the reporting rates from other countries we might be unpleasantly surprised, but there's more.

Sweden has undergone a number of other key shifts corresponding to the time period in question, not least being the reclassification of "rape" to include a much broader range of physical assault types than most countries. So a "rape" in Sweden means something very different to the US or France for instance, the latter means a conviction of a quite specific offence, the former a report of something much broader which would in many cases be covered by other offences elsewhere.

In addition there had been a very intense focus on womens' rights and education in the years leading up, raising the question that victim confidence in reporting might have been on concurrent rise.