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Notes -
"State" is big. At least most of US states are big (sorry, WY and RI). Thus, applying whole-state statistics to concentrated and heterogenеic phenomena is very misleading. San Francisco and Oakland are very different from Tahoe City and Napa Valley, despite both being in California. Martha's Vineyard and Springfield, MA are rather different places too. We can't just average them out and pretend gun laws and crime works the same way over all the California, for example.
Also, you may notice that your "objection" does not object to anything I said actually. I say "Decreasing X does not decrease Y, since we can witness data points with low X and high Y". And you say "we can also witness data points with high X and high Y". Well, yeah, OK. You got me. We can. That's not an objection to the lack of correlation between X and Y, you see.
Even more the lack of correlation is not causation. You see, for correlation you need that high X comes with high Y, and low X comes with low Y. We have that high X comes with high Y (let's assume that, I won't for the sake of argument here fight you on that) and low X comes with high Y. That's not even correlation.
Yes I can, if I look at the places where these efforts were effective, as to taking legal guns away, and we still have plenty of violence. That's empiric data - if I change X and Y does not move substantially, then I can conclude the attempt of changing Y by changing X failed. We can debate why it failed, but the failure is plain in the data.
I can refer you to the case of CashApp founder, just recently murdered in SF in a very un-lubricated manner. He is still as dead as any other murder victim.
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