Stricter gun controls won’t turn American into Denmark – but they’d certainly help

There’s a scene in the touching Richard Linklater film Boyhood where the young Mason goes to visit the rural family of his estranged father and is given a Bible and shotgun for the first time. I felt a niggling terror watching it, remembering Chekhov’s maxim, that the film would end with the boy taking the gun to himself, or his family, or his school classmates.

It’s understandable why the audience might fear the worst, seeing as America’s spree-killing epidemic seems to has no end in sight, with a new low reached on Sunday in Las Vegas.

Why doesn’t America just ban the damn things, people ask, or at least make them far harder to access, like in Japan for instance, where there are just six gun murders a year?

Certainly there are plenty of arguments for restricting guns, illustrated here and here.

However the problem with the statistics on gun violence, as Scott Alexander has