Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

I don't necessarily disagree with him about gun free zones, but I'd be careful about extending this logic to gun control/gun bans in general. Gun free zones don't work precisely because of the abundance of guns.

In regard to his claim that eliminating guns doesn't eliminate violence, but merely changes it: I hear this a lot, but one thing people never seem to consider is that it might be a change for the better. Crime statistics for England vs America show that restricting access to guns does at least correlate with lower murder rates. I don't think the discrepancy can be explained in any other way.

For example London has an extremely high crime rate, roughly 4x that of NYC in most categories of violent crime IIRC, yet a significantly lower murder rate. In my opinion, the only reasonable explanation for this is that guns are efficient tools for killing and criminals in London have less access to guns than they do in NYC.

The idea that murder-by-knife or some other weapon will fill the gap if guns are eliminated clearly seems to be untrue by these statistics. Probably because it's a lot harder to stab someone to death than it is to shoot them to death.