Posted on 01/09/2013 1:31:24 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
The United States has far more violent deaths than any other wealthy nation in part because there are so many residents who own guns and store them in unlocked places in their homes.
The lax gun rules are a major contributor to the low life expectancy rate that Americans have compared to their global counterparts.
That claim comes just weeks after the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and as politicians make calls for stricter gun controls.
The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents and none of the 16 other countries included in the review came anywhere close to that ratio.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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.
In raw numbers, we have the 4th most deaths by car accident in the world, only behind India, China, and Brazil. And India and China have a LOT more people than we do.
But yes, total gun deaths in this country is somewhat in the same ballpark, because of the large number of suicides.
I don’t know the information by race, but I read that if you remove the most populated cities, all of our rates (death, accident, suicide, injury, crime, etc.) are among the best in the world.
The cities are very dangerous.
I believe that’s rifles specifically, not all guns.
The Daily Mail article is still mistaken and/or dishonest on any number of points.
If he said that, he’s probably way wrong. My guess is he was talking about accidents, not homicides.
The 2009 CDC report shows that of our homicides, firearms are the number one cause of death, with 3.7 per 100,000; all other homicides put together are 1.7 per 100,000.
Contrary to some reports, we have very few accidental firearm deaths (564 in 2009, out of 118,000 accidental deaths).
This what you use.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-20
I think your math is correct but I'm betting it only applies for one year. Don't you have to multiply by 80 or so to get the effect on you?
I'm assuming that the 6 per 100,000 is per year even though the article doesn't say so.
Even so, potato chips are probably a bigger problem.
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?
Quite similar to pasty white Nordic countries. And you don't even have to take my word for it. Just look at states like the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa with comparable pasty white demographics (which also happen to be mainly of Nordic extraction).
The numbers back you up.
Crime data for each state and the entire US can be found here: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Demographics for each state, county and city can be found here: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
Wrong .... most killed and injured by guns are bad guys being killed and injured by other bad guys with guns
OK, that makes sense as well, since most firearms deaths are inner-city criminal actions, and people committing crimes in the cities are mostly using cheap concealed handguns.
The injury postulate I think would still hold. According to the CDC, in 2009 there were 774 unintentional deaths by being “struck by or against”. Ok, that doesn’t have to include just hammers. But there were only 564 unintentional firearm deaths in that year.
There were 31,000 unintentional poisonings. We could save a lot of lives it we just put child locks on all our poisons. :-)
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!
“According to the FBI, for 2011, there were between 12K and 13K gun deaths.”
I do not believe we have the 2011 data yet. For 2010 there were 8,775 homicides committed with firearms.
There were about 19,000 suicides committed with firearms. Many European nations have higher combined suicide and homicide rates than we do.
The U.S. combined suicide/homicide rate is 16.2
Finland is 18.8
Sweden is 17.2
Belgium about 20
France about 16.2
Luxembourg 16.8
Russia 42
Japan 24.5
My goodness, why didn’t anyone think of that before? ;^)
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
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