Deltoid

Since guns are very rarely used to defend against rapists, and only a small fraction of rapes are committed at gun point, and there is no good evidence for any deterrent effect for guns preventing rape, I doubt if gun control has a major effect on rape.

Eric Johnson said:

I assume you mean 'in Australia' for everything above...

Nope. In the US guns are used in self defence in about 0.5% of rapes. (See my recent posting.)

The number of rapes committed at gunpoint is irrelevant in this case, since men almost always can outpower women based on their physical strength.

She doesn't have to slug it out with the rapist -- she can scream for help or run away. An attacker with a gun effectively removes these options. Overall, rape is completed only 36% of time. 9% of US rapists are gun-armed [1]. If a gun allows a rapist to double the completion percentage, half of that 9% would not occur in the absence of a gun. The net effect of guns on rapes is therefore +4.5% (offensive uses)-0.5% (defensive uses). This is too small to noticeably affect the rate.

The rest of your assertion is weak at best. In fact, what you have said could imply the opposite -- since guns are very rarely used to defend against rapists, gun control has indeed had an effect on rape. In fact, I assert that gun control has so disarmed the average citizen to the point where the rapist is not deterred because he knows that there is an extremely low chance of his victim being armed. That, and your assertion that few rapes are defended against with guns, leads me to believe that gun control certainly does promote rape.

So "more guns"="less rape"?? Let's see:

Country        Rapes   Hand gun
                 [2]   ownership[3]
United States   26.4       29%
West Germany    11.3       6.5%
Canada           8.4        4%
Australia        6.3        2%
England & Wales  2.6       0.5%

The correlation in this (admittedly small) sample of countries would appear to go the other way.

[1] Kleck "Policy Lessons from Recent Gun Control Research" Law and Contempory Problems 49:35-62 [2] 1979 rates per 100,000 pop (from "The Size of the Crime Problem in Australia") [3] households owning handguns (from "Experiences of Crime across the World: Key findings of the 1989 International Crime Survey")