Chi-town vs H-town http://gunfreezone.net/wordpress/index.php/2013/03/06/a-tale-of-two-cities-chicago-vs-houston/ A tale of Two Cities: Chicago vs. Houston
I'm no fan of gun control because it obviously doesn't work and infringes on second amendment rights. But cherry picking two cities doesn't really prove anything. Compare NYC and Houston and you might conclude that gun control does work.
Good point. We were discussing gun violence in Chicago on the Notre Dame thread and I found this link, but you're right, it's not necessarily a good comparison.
Most western European Countries have a homicide rate about 1/10 that of Houston. The safest state in the US has about 1.4 murders per 100K. I think that says more about the kind of people who live in Iowa than it does about gun control in Iowa. If you look at Chicago on a map and see its proximity to Wisconsin and Indiana, neither of which have stringent gun control, it's kinda like building a dam halfway across the river. Isolated pockets of gun control in a country with no internal borders and checkpoints is a little different than national gun controls. By the way, Louisiana, the state with the highest homicide rate, pretty much has written its gun control laws as the NRA would recommend. As I've said elsewhere, I don't think the crucial difference in homicides is so much presence or absence of weaponry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state#MRord
There are quite a few issues where republicans go full retard to their own demise. They fight losing battles and expend a lot of political capital in doing so. Gun control is the democrats "full retard" issue. It makes no sense, is completely impractical, and is a losing battle politically on the national level. The only way that republicans start losing on the issue is if enough open carry nuts keep scaring granny at Wendy's with their AKs.
I think the GOP in swing states should stay away from open carry for no reason other than their crackpot activists. In a state l ike Texas where most of the elctorate thinks Obama is the antichrist and won't even listen to a Democrat, it doesn't matter much. However, in states that aren't so lopsided, those freaks could really make a difference. For example, if I was John Kasich (Ohio) or even Mike Pence (Indiana), I wouldn't want to get anywhere near those guys.