Everyone who talks or writes about the morally specious category “gun violence” should be reminded in some sharp way that those who are murdered with clubs or knives are just as dead as those who are gunned down, their friends and relatives just as bereaved, and the soul of the murderer just as stained. Perhaps IS beheading videos might be put to some good use in this regard. (I am absolutely certain that the relatives of the 21 Coptic New Martys of Libya take solace only from the fact that their sons and brothers dies as marytrs for Christ, and none from the fact that they were not “victims of gun violence”.)
The only comparable country to the United States — multi-ethnic with a long uncontrollable border — the Russian Federation has a murder rate about 8 times that of the U.S. with a firearms ownership rate about 10% of that in the U.S. This fact demonstrates the vacuity of “gun violence” as a category both in moral and policy considerations and makes the notion of “controlling gun violence” uninteresting both morally and as a matter of public health.
The statistical sleight-of-hand gun-haters like to use is that places with weak gun laws and high gun ownership rates have more “gun deaths.”
What they won’t tell you is that those places have the lowest per capita murder rates.
More guns, less murder.
Bill Whittle’s YouTube video “Number One With a Bullet” illustrates this very succinctly.
Here is a link to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pELwCqz2JfE
Here are links to the three data sources that he references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Fact is, states and countries with strong gun laws and low gun ownership rates lead the nation and world in per capita murder rate.
They also lead the world in violent crime rate.
Gun-controlled Britain has a low homicide rate, but it has the highest violent crime rate in the EU, a violent crime rate that is higher than even South African, and much higher than the United States.
The only first-world nation with a higher violent crime rate than Britain is Australia, a nation that also banned and confiscated firearms, stripping its people of their ability to defend themselves from violent criminals.
So if you like high violent crime and murder rates, by all means advocate taking guns away from law-abiding citizens.