The Failed Experiment: Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales

Widely televised firearm murders in many countries during the 20th Century have spurred politicians to introduce restrictive gun laws. The politicians then promise that the new restrictions will reduce criminal violence and "create a safer society." It is time to pause and ask if gun laws actually do reduce criminal violence. Gun laws must be demonstrated to cut violent crime or gun control is no more than a hollow promise. What makes gun control so compelling for many is the belief that violent crime is driven by the availability of guns and, more importantly, that criminal violence in general may be reduced by limiting access to firearms. In this study, I examine crime trends in Commonwealth countries that have recently introduced firearm regulations: i.e., Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. The widely ignored key to evaluating firearm regulations is to examine trends in total violent crime, not just firearms crime. Since firearms are only a small fraction of criminal violence, the public would not be safer if the new law could reduce firearm violence but had no effect on total criminal violence. The upshot is that violent crime rates, and homicide rates in particular, have been falling in the United States, but increasing in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The drop in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world. In 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office, violent crime increased during the 1990s. This contrast should provoke thinking people to wonder what happened in those countries where they introduced increasingly restrictive firearm laws

Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide? A review of international evidence

The world abounds in instruments with which people can kill each other. Is the widespread availability of one of these instruments, firearms, a crucial determinant of the incidence of murder? Or do patterns of murder and/or violent crime reflect basic socio-economic and/or cultural factors to which the mere availability of one particular form of weaponry is irrelevant? This article examines a broad range of international data that bear on the question whether widespread firearm access is an important contributing factor in murder and/or suicide. Our conclusion from the available data is that suicide, murder and violent crime rates are determined by basic social, economic and/or cultural factors with the availability of any particular one of the world's myriad deadly instrument being irrelevant

L2L^2 Analysis of the Multi-Configuration Time-Dependent Hartree-Fock Equations

The multiconfiguration methods are widely used by quantum physicists and chemists for numerical approximation of the many electron Schr\"odinger equation. Recently, first mathematically rigorous results were obtained on the time-dependent models, e.g. short-in-time well-posedness in the Sobolev space $H^2$ for bounded interactions (C. Lubichand O. Koch} with initial data in $H^2$, in the energy space for Coulomb interactions with initial data in the same space (Trabelsi, Bardos et al.}, as well as global well-posedness under a sufficient condition on the energy of the initial data (Bardos et al.). The present contribution extends the analysis by setting an $L^2$ theory for the MCTDHF for general interactions including the Coulomb case. This kind of results is also the theoretical foundation of ad-hoc methods used in numerical calculation when modification ("regularization") of the density matrix destroys the conservation of energy property, but keeps invariant the mass.Comment: This work was supported by the Viennese Science Foundation (WWTF) via the project "TDDFT" (MA-45), the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) via the Wissenschaftkolleg "Differential equations" (W17) and the START Project (Y-137-TEC) and the EU funded Marie Curie Early Stage Training Site DEASE (MEST-CT-2005-021122

Impact of potential climate change on plant available soil water and percolation in the Upper Danube basin

The soil root zone of the land surface provides plants with water for transpiration and therefore biomass production and its excess water percolates downwards and ultimately recharges the groundwater aquifers. Within the project GLOWA-Danube regional scale impacts of climate change on the water cycle are investigated. Potential changes in the water cycle based on climate scenarios for 2011 to 2060 are simulated with the decision support system DANUBIA that integrates models of natural as well as social sciences. This article presents the results of DANUBIA driven by an ensemble of 12 climates scenarios generated with a stochastic climate simulator regarding the future state of soil moisture and groundwater recharge in the Upper Danube basin

Properties of nonfreeness: an entropy measure of electron correlation

"Nonfreeness" is the (negative of the) difference between the von Neumann entropies of a given many-fermion state and the free state that has the same 1-particle statistics. It also equals the relative entropy of the two states in question, i.e., it is the entropy of the given state relative to the corresponding free state. The nonfreeness of a pure state is the same as its "particle-hole symmetric correlation entropy", a variant of an established measure of electron correlation. But nonfreeness is also defined for mixed states, and this allows one to compare the nonfreeness of subsystems to the nonfreeness of the whole. Nonfreeness of a part does not exceed that in the whole; nonfreeness is additive over independent subsystems; and nonfreeness is superadditive over subsystems that are independent on the 1-particle level.Comment: 20 pages. Submitted to Phys. Rev.