This is what we think of them: 
Reaction to the Nation graphic:
If the FBI says 6,000 people were murdered with handguns, around 300 (IIRC) with shotguns and 323 with rifles last year, how do we have 30,000 gun deaths per year? Where do the other 23,000 or so come from? Cleaning accidents? Suicides? Or is that just a bogus statistic? I’m thinking option 3...
Just for discussion, let’s assume this stat means there are 23,000 people killing themselves with firearms in the U.S. each year. In that case, the problem is not guns, it’s that there are 23,000 people depressed enough to kill themselves. They would find another method if there were no guns.
Also, note how the nine with guns are men and the one person with no gun is a woman (no guns for you girls, getting raped is morally superior to self-defense), is taller than the men (gun owners are obviously compensating!) and is shrugging her shoulders as if someone just asked her, “so, if someone tries to mug you or rape you, what will you do about it?”
We are an accident-prone nation. Interestingly, given how people rail about "gun accidents", guns are not high on the accidental death list. First, Accidents are the 5th leading cause of death in the US, Homicides are 15th.
Of the 118,021 accidental deaths in 2009, only 564 were due to firearms. (0.5%). Seven times more people died from accidental drowning (3517).
As to the overall premise -- our INFANT MORTALITY rate is very high relative to a lot of other developed nations (our overall rank is 50th). There isn't a LOT of infant deaths, but because they represent almost 0 life expectancy, they tend to pull the averages down a lot. Our IM rate is 6 per 100,000 -- MORE than our death rate by gun homicide. Monaco is first at 1.81 per 100,000.
Our life expectancy is ranked 57th. So yes, we could do better -- but we probably have a lot more fun in our shorter lives.
BTW, it looks to me like the largest driver of our lower life expectancy is not our homicide rate, but our rate of car accident deaths.
We are 57th, with 12.3 deaths per 100,000 population. This is because we have lots of drivers, and we drive a lot further overall.
Hey, I have an idea: Lets remove from the study all deaths occuring in cities under Democrat rule for the last 50 years.
The lax gun rules are a major contributor to the low life expectancy rate that Americans have compared to their global counterparts.
It is, well, certainly an interesting hypothesis.
But one might certainly be pardoned for inquiring: Where is the case for a causal relationship between gun ownership and a lower life expectancy?
You cannot trust data concerning gun violence when it comes from the Brady Campaign.
They always include things like suicides and police shootings in their number crunching, which depending on what year you look at, can make up more than half of all firearm fatalities in the U.S.!!!
Taking guns away from Americans won't take them out of the hands of the police and someone who wants to kill themselves, can just step out in front of a bus or hang themselves....rope is cheap.
The media cannot be trusted to be honest in the area of gun control.....especially when it comes to the U.S. and the Brady Campaign is just as dishonest!
Even assuming an absurdly high number of murders/year - say 100,000 - the effect on mortality in a population of 360,000,000 + would be microscopic:
100,000/360,000,000 = 0.000277777777777
Then, assuming an absurdly high mortality rate in the general population of 10%/year:
100,000/36,000,000 = 0.002777777777777
Ergo, refer back to opening graphic.
/.02
I would love to see the statistics excluding the large urban areas, which are basically no go zones and which also have the most stringent gun laws.
I must have missed it in the article. Where do they state the DOJ statistics which show that from 1976-2005 blacks represented 12% of the US population but accounted for 52.2% of all homicides committed?
Did I miss that somewhere? Where is it?
How many people in Europe were murdered during the 1940s?
How many people were murdered in the no-guns-for-citizens regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR? China? Cambodia?
We don't have any worse a crime problem. We have a black-crime problem.
Just wait until the next European Communist/Fascist culling.
Sure. Like I’m going to believe the Brady Bunch, Justice Dept. and Gallup as published by The Nation.
nothing personal but take minority crime out and our crime rates are as low as Scandinavia