 In this video, I'm going to evaluate four popular claims made by opponents of gun control in the US. I'll evaluate these claims against the real-world facts. Sources are available in the video description. All comments are allowed without moderation, but please attempt to back any assertions with primary sources. In the words of Christopher Hitchens, what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Claim 1. Hitler outlawed guns, presumably to make it easier to control the population. Reality. Following World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the Weimar government, disarmed most of Germany. Gun regulations in 1919 under Article 169 of the Versailles Treaty forbid ownership of any handguns or long guns by citizens and militia. In 1928, nine years later, during a period of German hyperinflation, a law was passed which allowed citizens to own guns of any type, provided they had a permit and were of, quote, persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a gun permit. A select group of officials on law enforcement were exempted from the permit requirement. In other words, the laws in Germany prior to Hitler were very similar to currently proposed regulations in the US. Under Hitler, the idea of citizenship was redefined to exclude Jewish people and certain political opposition groups, but ownership of guns in the permitted groups was expanded. Permits were now valid for three years instead of one. The legal age for purchase was lowered from 20 to 18. And the number of people who were exempted from getting a permit was expanded to include hunters, government and industry workers, and active Nazi party members. Contrary to the claim, Hitler expanded gun ownership as one of his first acts. Jews were specifically restricted, but that was part of a much broader agenda to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Claim two, Stalin took guns away from the Soviet people with a 1929 law. Reality. This is partly true, or at least true for Stalin than for Hitler. The Tsars of Russia had always feared revolution and made every effort to discourage private gun ownership. But in the rural areas of the former Soviet republics, hunting was a way of life, so allowances were often made for ownership of long guns. The Bolsheviks, when they came to power, attempted to put restriction on even this limited gun ownership, but facing strong opposition, they essentially continued the Tsarist policy of allowances for hunting with permits. Stalin came to power in a country with very few private weapons, but he did change the way that the military were issued weapons. Specifically, weapons were required to be kept at secure facilities when not in use. Even the personal sidearms of high-ranking officers. This facilitated the purges and nighttime kidnapping of officers who he felt were disloyal. He also increased the severity of punishments for buying, selling, and owning illegal weapons, making it a political crud, and transferred the responsibility for enforcement to his secret police. While I can't disagree that Stalin was pleased to disarm his officers in order to facilitate his brutal autocracy, and that pre-Soviet and Soviet Russian gun control was largely to reduce the risk of popular rebellion, I wouldn't say disarmament was a prelude to mass slaughter. The only new gun policy I could find attributed to Stalin only applied to the military and only much later in his administration, after millions had already died in the guloks. It was more the policy of a paranoid madman than a power grab. Claim 3. If you outlaw guns, only criminals will have guns. Reality. So far as I can tell, no one is proposing all guns be outlawed. The most stringent control measures seem to be related to licensing and restriction on who can own guns and how they can be sold. 40% of Americans own a gun, myself among them. If we piled all the guns in the US up for a giant bonfire, it would be 300 million of them stacked together. Supposing a reasonable ballpark figure of 1 kg per weapon, that's 300 million kilograms of metal and wood, 330,000 tons, the weight of three modern aircraft carriers. What many gun control opponents miss here is that gun control isn't a prohibition, it's an attempt to control where guns are sold and to whom. The goal is to restrict access to firearms, so that it's harder for a criminal to get one. That means criminal background checks, permits, classes, restrictions on the types of firearms that can be made and sold, where they can be sold and to whom. One of the contentious ideas is restricting private sales of guns, so that criminals couldn't find an easy alternative to regulated sales, a shadowy back channel without accountability. Whose interest does it serve to have unrestricted sales to criminal and non-criminal alike? In fact, we could say, contra the claim, that a lack of gun regulation means more criminals have guns. The meat of the claim, though, is that only law-abiding gun owners will comply willingly with gun regulations. Criminals, by definition, don't worry about complying with law. That would seem to suggest that all laws are worthless. If you outlaw speeding, only criminals will speed. If you outlaw littering, only criminals will litter. So why do we bother? It's a reasonable question, and I have no doubt that many libertarians will offer their opinions in the comments section. The presumption of rule of law is that we need these policies so that we can have enforcement. As a group, we decide what shall be prohibited and what the consequences of that action will be. Speed limits don't prevent speeders. Anti-littering laws don't prevent littering, but they do reduce it and give law enforcement a way to detect criminals. How many murderers, rapists, and thieves are caught due to speeding? If criminals are the only ones who disregard gun laws, how much easier will it be to detect them among the law-abiding gun owners? There is a second factor here, implicit in the claim. The fewer unregulated guns in private hands, the fewer there are available to steal, to borrow, to privately transfer to people who would use them for illicit purposes. Criminals are not exempted from supply and demand. The more difficult it is to get a gun, the more likely they are to seek an easier alternative. It won't prevent crime, but it may reduce gun crime and supply of unregulated guns. Thus, I cannot agree with the claim. Good gun regulations should reduce the number of criminals who have guns through increased opportunities for screening and detection, and through reduced availability of unregulated guns. Claim four. Those areas with the Titus gun regulation have the highest violent crime rate, suggesting criminals prefer a disarmed public. Reality. Gun control is one way the governments respond to epidemics of violence, and sometimes it can be effective. Sometimes it's not. Some laws are purely after the fact, and others have more of a preventative before the fact element. The most likely explanation for correlations between tighter gun regulation and violent crime is the reversed causation in the claim. That is, more violent crime often leads to governments enacting stricter gun laws. This is most notable in the extreme in urban areas where gang violence is most notable. Detroit and Washington DC being good examples. Let's take a moment to look at Detroit and Michigan's current policies. In the state of Michigan, to purchase a handgun, you have to clear a background check and take a basic pistol safety written test. Then you can purchase a permit valid for only 10 days to buy a handgun. The purchase is recorded and filed, and the gun must undergo safety inspection before sale, although most dealers have their inventory pre-inspected, so this primarily applies to private sales. After sale, the gun is inspected and logged by local police. Gun owners are required to have either a trigger lock or a gun case. If you commit a gun-related crime, your gun license and your gun is forfeit. Now consider in parallel the process for getting a license to drive a car in Michigan. You take a basic written test, demonstrate driving safety in a road test with a law enforcement officer sitting next to you, and have a background check to confirm your identity and screen for criminal record. You can then drive a car, assuming it has undergone a safety and emission test, conducted by a state-regulated inspector, and has clear title and registration, and liability insurance, and is in safe operating condition with seat belts fastened. If you commit a car-related crime, indicating you to be an unsafe car driver, your license can be suspended and your car impounded. When I compare these two, I find them very similar, but these are some of the most stringent gun laws in the U.S. Do Michigan car drivers find car ownership too much of a hassle? Do only criminals own and use cars? Is it an insult for law-abiding car owners to be treated as criminals when they apply for a driver's license? I suspect no to all three. Why would it be so different for gun use? We can also turn this around and ask if driver's licenses have had an impact on illegal driving. I can't answer that. Clearly it hasn't eliminated misuse of cars, but who knows if it's reducing the number of unsafe drivers on the road. Would you prefer to live in a state without restrictions on who can drive, what vehicles they can operate, and in what manner? Academic analysis of the number of people who are armed in any given geography versus the violent crime rate generally leads to the same conclusion. More guns, of any kind, equals more violent crime. Or we could say more violent crime equals more guns. It's likely that there's a two-way causation. The more shootings we see on the local news, the more likely we are to go out and buy guns. The more guns people have, the more likely we are to see shootings on the local news. I'll do a deeper analysis of this in a future video, but to wrap up on this claim, I don't think any clear conclusion can be drawn by simply correlating gun policy and crime statistics in any given area. Up next, I'll continue my gun policy analysis with the effect that an Australian gun buyback in 1997 and 1998 following the Port Arthur massacre had on crime statistics there. The results should be interesting. Thanks for watching.