In summary, with my personal confidence levels: 1. Scatterplots showing raw correlations between gun ownership and “gun deaths” are entirely driven by suicide, and therefore dishonest to use to prove that guns cause murder (~100% confidence) 2. But if you adjust for all relevant confounders, there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates (~90% confidence). This relationship is likely causal (~66% confidence). 3. The majority of the difference between America’s murder rate and that of other First World countries is not because of easier access to guns in America (~90% confidence). 4. But some of it is due to easier access to guns. This is probably 0.5 murders/100K/year. 5. An Australian-style gun control program that worked and had no side effects would probably prevent 2000 murders in the US. It would also prevent a much larger number of suicides. I am otherwise ignoring suicides in this piece because discussing them would make me too angry. 6. Probably the amount of lost gun-related enjoyment an Australian-style gun control program would cause do not outweigh the benefits. 7. This analysis makes me tentatively in favor of Australian-style gun control for the US, but I can’t say anything for sure until I’ve also looked more into the experimental evidence from various smaller-scale gun control programs, which I’m not going to do.

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