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    Worth considering: no matter how factually true data-points are, this would be a correlation that does not logically prove causation (even though I do intuitively find it convincing enough to suppose it's part of the cause): it's possible that murder rates started trending up at roughly the same time due to other factors not being considered, and might've done so at the same rate, or faster, or slower, had the guns not been banned. In the complex world we live in, looking at just a couple of variables and drawing conclusions is liable to overlook things at best.
    – mtraceur
    Commented Feb 16, 2018 at 20:49
  • 18
    FWIW, the stats from Australia show the opposite correlation: skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18788/… skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/976/…
    – Tim Sparkles
    Commented Feb 16, 2018 at 21:18
  • 3
    "When you dig into sites that present this argument, they all appear to be strong advocates against regulating firearms, which makes me suspicious" - Regardless of the merits of this case, this should neither make you more suspicious, nor less suspicious. It is of course possible that they are advocates against firearm regulation because of this argument, as opposed to pushing this argument because they are advocates against firearm regulation.
    – Everyone_Else
    Commented Feb 17, 2018 at 1:07
  • 1
    I think conclusions also depend on the socio-economics of the population. I lived in Georgia in the early 1990s. Several years earlier it was {stated|rumored|?} Kennesaw County, Georgia passed a law requiring all residents to own a gun, and the effect was crime went down. Around that same time Cook County, Illinois passed a law banning ownership and crime went up. I've never seen citations, the laws or the statistics, but it was brought up frequently in conversation. There is a big difference in the populations of inner city Chicago and the good ole' boys in the Georgia mountains.
    – user36321
    Commented Feb 17, 2018 at 5:22
  • 6
    The UK homicide rate was low to begin with, it went from 11 then to 9.8 now, USA is always around 50... The UK doesn't have much room for improvement and guns were never as popular here as they are in the USA.
    – Jalapeno
    Commented Feb 19, 2018 at 11:52