Gun Control by Scientific Method

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The scientific method is a way to ask and answer a question by making observation and doing experiments. I am focusing on gun control in America. My question is, does gun control reduce crime? I have researched many articles on the internet. I have looked at the result of current and previous gun control laws on the books. First I want to see what percentage of gun involved crime took place in the United States. Roughly 16,272 murders were committed in the United States during 2008. Of these, about 10,886 or 67% were committed with firearms. Based on survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 5,340,000 violent crimes were committed in the United States during 2008. These include simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders. Of these, about 436,000 or 8% were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun (Agresti and Smith 2010). I then choose to look at specific cities in which gun laws were passed to increase gun control. In 1976, the Washington, D.C. City Council passed a law generally prohibiting residents from possessing handguns and requiring that all firearms in private homes be kept unloaded and rendered temporally inoperable via disassembly or installation of a trigger lock. The law became operative on Sept. 24, 1976. During the years in which the D.C. handgun ban and trigger lock law was in effect, the Washington, D.C. murder rate averaged 73% higher than it was at the outset of the law, while the U.S. murder rate averaged 11% lower. In 1997, Britain passed a law requiring civilians to surrender almost all privately owned handguns to the police. More than 162,000 handguns and 1.5 million pounds of ammunition were "compulsorily surrendered" by February 1998. Using "records of firearms held on firearms certificates," police accounted for all but fewer than eight of all legally owned handguns in England,

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