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")