The beeb’s article Missouri gun murders ‘rose after law repeal’ says that an upcoming (but currently unavailable) study from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research “provides some of the most compelling evidence yet for tighter gun controls in the US.”
Apparently it does so by linking the removal of a legal requirement for background checks prior to handgun purchase with a rise in gun homicides. That correlation seems pretty likely, I think; if you intend to kill someone, and you can easily get a gun, why would you use anything else? It’s so obvious as to be almost a tautology.
But I will be interested in seeing how this plays out, since the FBI says that homicides overall went down in Missouri during the same period the study claims that gun homicides went up. This has been the national trend; homicides mostly decreasing as gun ownership has trended steadily upwards.
It seems to me that anti-gun crusaders don’t really argue any more honestly than the NRA’s anti-Obama basket cases.