the opportunity cost of gun control

One of the recurring, common themes in my "graphics matter" series of posts is that anti-rights cultists simply have no concept of scale. For example, they would claim that "firearm deaths are a ‘major health issue’", but when you look at the numbers and put them in perspective, those firearm-related fatalities are not even in the top ten causes of American deaths. Major? No so much. Likewise, those "gun control" supporters would have their faithful believe that "’gun control’ is crime control" when the truth is that criminals represent a mind-blowingly insignificant fraction of the overall firearm owners who will be detrimentally affected by anti-firearms legislation… and those criminals are not going to follow the laws regardless.

Well, last month, Bob S. strove to steal his idea back from me, and put the number of firearm-related crimes in some greater perspective, to better show how monomaniacal your average anti-rights nut is, and how irrational their desires are.

For example, if you were to look at all firearm owners in comparison to all crimes of various sorts, how would the numbers balance out? Well, let us first establish a baseline of all crimes (be advised, the root images are flipping huge – right-click and "open in new window" to get the full effect): 

That graphic was probably not so surprising to you.

But what about only crimes that are firearm-related?

That particular image might have surprised you.

And, now, for the grand comparison (the big version of this should, in theory, also be animated):

One would think that if the anti-rights cultists were genuinely interested in increasing the safety and security of average Americans throughout the country, they would focus on such things as property crime and larceny theft, where even a small percentage change could result in a massive decrease in raw numbers. Instead, they rabidly latch on to abridging and infringing on all American’s rights for the supposed purpose of addressing a subset of crime that is smaller than property crime, larceny theft, burglary, motor vehicle theft, aggravated assault, and robbery, individually.

Is it common sense to focus on such a small, narrow aspect of crime, when so many other forms of crime are detrimentally impacting so many more people’s lives? Is it common sense to forcibly deny Constitutionally-protected individual rights to millions upon millions of law-abiding American citizens just because a borderline-statistically-insignificant number of total American citizens cannot properly behave themselves in society? Is it common sense to overlook the massively-more-influential effects your efforts could be having in other fields?

I say, "No," but you probably saw that coming already.