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Notes -
idk why I said, 'inevitably,' that's not true. It does seem plausible though that we will or will soon hit diminishing returns short of some breakthrough technology.
At least in the modern west, you can opt out of eating 6,000 calories a day, while in the premodern world you couldn't opt out of the terrible effects of poverty and disease.
I am familiar with this point, and it seems undeniable that it's true to some extent, though homicide in the 50s was unusually low even by historic standards. Though I would postulate that plausibly, this is offset to an extent by more widespread access to killing tools, since guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century. I wonder how much of the rise in homicide is down to urbanization.
IIRC this is driven by a smaller percentage of the population having more of them, so it should be more than balanced out by a declining share of the population owning guns.
But it means at the end of the day there are more guns floating around, and most illegal guns were legal guns at one point.
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