Posted on 04/05/2018 12:13:06 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Watching the recent emotional speeches and marches supporting gun control, I can’t shake a question that nags me: Would we be safer with fewer guns?
Gun control advocates have an intuitive argument. Guns are an efficient way to commit murder. If we reduce the number of guns in society, we axiomatically will reduce murders.
Reducing gun violence is a desirable goal, particularly when one sees shooters mowing down children. After I thought about it, I realized the question of whether reducing guns in a society will lead to fewer murders is a testable hypothesis. You can measure gun ownership and murder rates. No two countries have the same gun laws or the same murder rates.
So I jumped on Wikipedia to answer a question: Do countries with higher murder rates have more guns, and vice versa?
This question can be evaluated in a ratio: the number of legally owned guns per 100,000 versus the number of murders per 100,000. According to the theory, the ratio should be relatively stable. So countries with fewer guns will have fewer murders (a small number divided by a small number) and a country with more guns should have more murders (a big number divided by a big number).
I took the countries with the 100 highest murder rates. I added to the sample countries that compare to the United States culturally such as European countries, Australia, Japan, etc. I deleted countries for which I could find no gun ownership stats or countries that were small or obscure. My profile looked at 98 countries, or a pretty solid slice of all the countries in the world.
America is by far the country that owns the most guns per 100,000. In America, there are actually more guns than people. Our murder rate is much higher than that of our European counterparts. So far, the gun control hypothesis seems to be holding up.
But guns in America are very unlikely to be involved in murders. Our ratio of guns to murders is 20,696 guns privately and legally owned for every murder. Not every murder involves a gun. But the gun-control hypothesis suggests guns still make murder easier and more common.
The murder capital of the world is El Salvador. El Salvador has done a relatively good job rounding up legal guns. There are only 5,800 guns per 100,000 residents (compared to over 101,000 in America), yet El Salvador’s ratio of guns to murders is a staggering 53. Every year, there’s a murder for every 53rd gun in El Salvador.
The countries that have been most successful at limiting private, legal gun ownership are 1. Ethiopia, 2. Eritrea, 3. Haiti, 4. North Korea, and 5. Rwanda. Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Haiti all have higher murder rates than that of the United States. North Korea and Rwanda have slightly lower murder rates (4.4 and 4.5 per 100,000 respectively versus the United States at 4.88).
Let’s look at the countries with the highest concentrations of gun ownership (excluding Yemen and Iraq as active war zones). Guns per murder in those countries are,
Norway is a particularly interesting example. It has 10 times the gun ownership rate of the United Kingdom, but only half the murder rate.
When one excludes Iraq and Yemen, not one of the countries on the list of the 10 highest rates of gun ownership also appears on the list of the top ten highest murder rates. In fact, the countries with the highest murder rates have markedly low gun ownership rates.
It really doesn’t matter how you slice this data. The conclusion is inescapable: High concentrations of private, legal gun ownership do not correlate positively to increased murders. Indeed, you can look at almost any slice of data and conclude the opposite: Higher private ownership of guns can be strongly correlated to lower murder rates.
The data also exposes some myths I have heard about gun control. For example, I’ve heard activists tout Australia, which supposedly banned all guns. Australia has advanced a number of gun control measures over the years. Nevertheless, according to the data, Australia has a rate of private ownership of guns of 13,100 per 100,000 and a murder rate of .98.
Australia has almost twice as many guns per capita as the United Kingdom, for example, and a comparable murder rate. New Zealand has almost twice as many guns per capita as Australia but a lower crime rate.
Countries with both a low rate of private gun ownership and a low murder rate exist, but they are clearly data outliers. These include the Netherlands (3,900 guns per 100,000, for a murder rate of .61) the United Kingdom (6,200 guns per 100,000, for a murder rate of .92), Japan, and Portugal. Places like Norway, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany overwhelm those examples because they all have high rates of gun ownership and enviable crime rates.
This isn’t a perfect study. I didn’t take the effort to include every country in the world, and I did skip many Asian countries. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering why so many countries that have relatively successful programs of limiting private lawful ownership of guns are so dangerous and why countries with such high rates of private gun ownership are relatively safe. Even in a place like the United Kingdom, where the gun control seems to be effective (with a low murder rate of .92 per 100,000), it’s arguable that the UK’s peer countries such as Germany and Austria have had more success controlling crime in spite of allowing greater freedom of gun ownership.
The ratio of murders per gun works as a decent measure for how responsible a country’s citizens are with their firearms. Measured in this light, an owner of a private legal gun in America measures as one of the most responsible in the world. A gun in America is 387 times less likely to be used in a murder than in El Salvador. Even in Japan, which has one of the lowest murder and gun ownership rates in the world, there are ten times as many murders per gun than in America.
Before U.S. governments makes anything illegal, it should be demonstrated that gun restrictions will have the desired effect. The perverse effect of increasing murder rates by reducing private gun ownership has been demonstrated in numerous studies. Places like Chicago, Washington DC, and New York have repeatedly experienced unintended consequences of aggressive gun control laws.
When marchers scream to ban guns, they’re pushing to make America more like El Salvador (1 murder for every 52 guns), Ethiopia (1 per 53), Honduras (1 per 88). All of these countries have succeeded in limiting gun ownership even if they can’t keep their citizens safe. The numbers are clear: murders are less common when the victim might be armed.
It’s a lot harder to load people onto cattle cars if they have guns.
Yep. It is not and never has been about crime or making anything better. It is all about control.
And how was the statistics look if we remove those few counties, I think a half a dozen, that account for 90% of the non-suicide gun deaths in the US?
Good article
The communists and socialists in russia, china, germany, hell most of europe, and almost all of the western hemisphere, faced the very same problem: how to disarm the populace and take over without them killing us first when they find out what we’re up to.
No government has ever wanted to disarm its citizens for any good reason.
When there’s calls for gun control by government officials and groups of people that protest to achieve that goal, is the time for people to start arming themselves up to the teeth, with the expectation that the citizens will become the hunted.
Great saying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pELwCqz2JfE
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.
Every time there is a shooting in America, our moral betters on the left immediately ammo up the assault rifle of their rhetorical arsenal: namely, our country’s sick, twisted obsession with personal firearms; our adolescent, psychosexual, dangerous and frankly embarrassing when facing our European film critic friends AMERICAN GUN CULTURE.
Hopping over to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, for example, we discover that when it comes to per capita gun ownership, the USA does in fact top the list: when measured as the number of guns per 100 residents, the US comes in first, at ninety! NINETY guns per one hundred residents: evidence for the Progressives on the left that they do in fact live in the murder capitol of the world; because when it comes to gun ownership, America IS number one with a bullet, with by far the highest per capita gun ownership in the world – 90 guns per 100 people being half again more than the number two spot held by Serbia, with 58.2.
Now all we have to do to prove the left-wing Progressive weenie case for banning guns is to do is a quick search for the per capita MURDER rate… and sure enough, leading the number two country by about half again more with 90 murders per 100,000 people is… Honduras.
Socialist, gun-controlled Honduras. Because even though America has by far the highest per capita gun ownership rate, we don’t have the highest per capita murder rate. And unfortunately for the Progressive leftist argument, we’re not second either. Or third.
When it comes to per capita murders, Team USA didn’t even make the top five.
As a matter of fact, we didn’t even make the top ten.
Or the top twenty. Or the top thirty. Or the top forty. We’re not in the top fifty per capita murders. Gun Culture America is not in the top sixty nations in terms of per capita murders. Or the top seventy. Or the top eighty. Or the top ninety.
Of the 218 nations and territories listed for per capita murders, the United States of America – murderville – did not break the top one hundred. We are, with 4.7 murders per 100,000 people in 2012, number 111.
111th place puts near top of the bottom half of all of the nations and territories in the world when it comes to total per capita murders… and virtually all – if not all -- of those nations ranked higher than us are big-state socialist utopias with stringent gun control laws.
How tragically disappointing that must be for our moral superiors.
And unfortunately for the left, it gets worse. Because 111th place America’s murder rate of 4.7 per 100,000 citizens is artificially much higher than it should be, because it includes so many deadly, murderous, toxic places… like number one on the list of highly gun controlled, Democratically-governed-since-the-stone-age murder pits like Detroit Michigan.
Detroit, with strict gun control laws has a per capita murder rate of 54.6 murders per 100,000 citizens. If Detroit were its own country, it would just beat Venezuela for SECOND as the most murderous country in the world, behind Honduras.
America’s 111th place, 4.7 murder per 100,000 people also includes, in order, Democratically governed, heavily gun controlled New Orleans, with 53.2 murders per hundred thousand; St. Louis, with 35.5; Baltimore with 34.9; Newark, 34.4; Oakland, 31.8; followed by Stockton 23.7; Kansas City 22.6, Philadelphia 21.5, Cleveland 21.3, Memphis 20.2, Atlanta 19.0 and Chicago, with 18.5 murders per 100,000 per year.
America’s per capita average of 4.7 murders includes all of these high-crime areas. The first city to appear in Gun-Mad Texas is Dallas, which isn’t in the top twenty. America’s overall average of 4.7 is as low as it is because of places like Plano, Texas – the last city on the list – with a murder rate of 0.4. Having been to Plano Texas several times, I can tell you with confidence that virtually every home in Plano Texas has an entire arsenal of Ar-15 assault rifles, semi-automatic shotguns, 30.06 hunting rifles, .45’s, .357s, 38s, 9mms, an assortment .22s for the kids to practice with, not to mention every species of bowie knife, hunting knife, jack knife, bayonet, switchblade pointy rocks and sharp sticks.
The per capita murder rate in Gun Nut Central is 0.4 per 100,000: if the United States of America, as a nation, had the same murder rate as Plano Texas, we would not but 111 out of 218; we’d be 211 out of 218 – well below Switzerland at 0.6, HALF of Germany, Spain and Denmark at 0.8, and well, well below half of New Zealand, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, France and Australia. If all of America had the murder rate of the gun-nut capital of Gun Culture USA – Plano, Texas – then America’s per capita murder rate would be ONE QUARTER of those murderous, violent, rampaging, death-worshipping Belgians with their horrific 1.6 murders per hundred thousand.
Maybe it’s not the guns. Maybe it’s the people holding the guns. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.
Even as the so called “assault weapons” ban expired and the AR-15 became the most common rifle in America, even as the number of guns in America steadily climbed in the last 20 years, the murder rate halved.
Explain that Gun Grabbers,
No. Gun control does not reduce violence and murder.
But that is not its purpose, is it?
Gun control is not about crime, it is about making people easier to control.
Are those ratios per “gun shot” murders ? or all murders ?
I wonder what “non-gun shot” related murder stats would look like ?
GUN CONTROL KILLS
The causes of murder are behavioral, with an element sometimes of socially inspired behavior, and not the weapons murderers choose.
If cows had guns, we humans would all be vegetarians.
Bkmk
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.