Some international stats on gun homicide

[HiPointDem]

The Small Arms Survey...although it is from 2007, it collates civilian gun ownership rates for 178 countries around the world...With less than 5% of the world's population, the United States is home to roughly 35–50 per cent of the world's civilian-owned guns, heavily skewing the global geography of firearms and any relative comparison...

So, given those caveats, we can see which countries have the highest ownership rates for firearms - and which have the highest gun murder rates.

The key facts are:

• The US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world - an average of 88 per 100 people. That puts it first in the world for gun ownership - and even the number two country, Yemen, has significantly fewer - 54.8 per 100 people

• But the US does not have the worst firearm murder rate - that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the US is number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people.

• Puerto Rico tops the world's table for firearms murders as a percentage of all homicides - 94.8%. It's followed by Sierra Leone in Africa and Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list


Countries with higher murder by gun rates than the US: gun murders/100,000 & guns/100

Anguilla: 7.14/100,000

Argentina: 3.02/100,000
10.2/100

Bahamas: 15.2/100,000
5.3/100

Barbados: 2.99/100,000
7.8/100

Belize: 21.82/100,000
10/100

Brazil: 18.1/100,000
8/100

Colombia: 27.9/100,000
5.9/100

Costa Rica: 4.59/100,000
9.9/100

Dominican Republic: 16.3/100,000
5.1/100

Ecuador: 12.73/100,000
1.3/100

etc....


Countries with low rates of gun homicide but relatively high rates of gun ownership:

Austria: .22/100,000
30.4/100,000

Bahrain: 0/100,000
24.8/100

Canada: .51
30.8

Croatia: .39
21.7

Cyprus: .46
36.4

Finland: .45
45.3

France: .006
31.2

Germany: .19
30.3

Iceland: 0
30.3

etc....

...Switzerland: .77
45.7

No death figures available for yemen, the second-highest gun-owning society...

[Electric Monk]

1. ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1993049
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1996549

[BainsBane]

2. Murder is not the same as gun deaths

Murder requires intent. What about all gun deaths, including accidental killings?

[HiPointDem]

3. feel free to post your own list. imo, accidental death by firearm is the risk the owner takes with

his own life or his family's lives mostly.

[BainsBane]

4. Here are a couple

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
This lists the US as 12th. Murder also requires a legal determination, which introduces an added factor of how legal systems respond to gun violence.

http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Homicide/Homicides_by_firearms.xls

What you so easily dismiss is a major fallout of gun proliferation. Domestic disputes become deadly with guns, while tiny children accidentally kill themselves. Many of those victims are women and children who die because of the risks men take with their lives. Dead is dead, whether or not you think they count.

[HiPointDem]

5. i'm not dismissing it. i'm saying that's a risk that primarily affects the gun-owner & his family -

it always has been a risk, just like having certain pharmaceuticals in the house is a risk to kids, or riding in a car is.

yes, dead is dead. you are cavalierly dismissing the risks of owning an automobile.

the us is 12th on that list because it doesn't include all the countries and/or it is using data collected by a variety of agencies in a variety of years ranging from 1998 to 2012.

my thread is not about accidents, but about homicides. feel free to make your own thread about accidents.

[BainsBane]

6. cars have a purpose

getting from here to there. Guns also have a purpose: to kill, and they do it very efficiently. No one should be surprised when they perform exactly as designed. I must have missed the recent rash of cars killing dozens of children at schools and shopping malls.

The first set of stats you list specify murder, not homicide. An accidental death of one person by another is indeed a homicide. It does not include self inflicted deaths. The US has the highest rate of gun violence in the industrialized world. You evidently feel the fact that we are not as bad as some former war zones makes it okay to continue to allow unfettered gun proliferation.

You want to present partial numbers to justify gun proliferation. Feel free, but it's obvious what you're doing.

[HiPointDem]

7. No, I presented homicides & clearly stated that, because this discussion takes place in the

immediate wake of a mass homicide.

You want to bring accidents into this discussion, because your primary aim is to ban guns.

My primary aim is to get people to examine whether there is a strong correlation between the rate of gun ownership & gun homicide, which there isn't.

And to get people to think about why the incidence of these kind of mass murders dramatically increased after 1980 instead of jerking their knees in unison.

For the last time, you want to talk about accidents, I have no problem with you making your own thread about it.

[BainsBane]

9. your OP says murders

which does not include all homicides. Perhaps that's an issue with the Guardian article, but that is what you say. Most wrongful death cases are not adjudicated as murders. Think of all the manslaughter convictions.

There obviously is a strong correlation between guns and gun deaths. Your own numbers prove that. The only thing you show is that the US doesn't have the highest murder rate using guns in the world. Columbia, with a failed state, is higher. Guatemala, filled with decommissioned death squads, is higher. Your standard of comparison is very low.

If you are going to try to prove a point based on faulty logic in a public forum, you will get called on it. If you don't want your views criticized, you're in the wrong place. The NRA or Free Republic are doubtless filled with people who will agree completely, regardless of your figures.

[HiPointDem]

10. the op says homicide. my own numbers prove no such thing; they show countries with low

rates of gun ownership with very high rates of gun homicide and countries with medium rates of gun ownership with near-non-existent rates of gun homicide.

i don't care if you criticize the op, but it's rather irritating when someone wants to claim that accidents should be included in homicide stats.

it's also irritating when someone can't discuss a topic without accusing his co-discussant of being a member of the nra. it shows he lacks imagination & thinks in black and white.

[BainsBane]

12. a direct quote from your OP

the heading for the numbers you provide:

"Countries with higher murder by gun rates than the US: gun murders/100,000 & guns/100"


Some other problems with your logic. 1) Puerto Rico is part of the US. 2)Your numbers do not conform with the 2012 UN reports. 3) If you are to dismiss accidental deaths, your entire point about cars is nullified, since those are accidental deaths. Accidental guns deaths is very much part of our gun culture, as is mistaking one's own daughter for an intruder and killing her, as a man did this week. That is not a murder, but it is another child dead from gun violence.

We have the highest rate of gun violence in the industrialized world, and slightly under the former war zones you list. As I said, you evidently hold this country to very low standards. Our poverty rates are also lower than all of those nations. Is that satisfactory to you?

[HiPointDem]

13. that is my own slip. puerto rico is a us territory, not a *state*. thus it is not 'part' of the

united states and not included in us data.

our poverty rate isn't lower than all those nations, either. nor are they all former war zones.

please go make your own op about accidents. i won't be responding to you again, you don't know how to do civil discussion.

[BainsBane]

14. LOL

Uncivil. Pointing out flaws of logic is uncivil? What a shrinking violet.

[Rex]

16. That is code for, "you won and I hate you for it".

I mean MURDER is in bold fer crying out loud!

Oh well, I guess I am uncivil too for pointing out the obvious.

[BainsBane]

19. Obviously I was terribly rude

In trying to use logic. His response is very telling.

[EX500rider]

17. former war zones?

Costa Rica? The Bahamas? St Kitts?

[BainsBane]

18. Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia

And yes even parts of Costa Rica. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate Remember the 1980s? All those death squads are now decommissioned carrying out a great deal of violence. Also, kinda wondering, how is it you get the Farc and AUC to tell the UN how many guns they have? Argentina Is a former, brutal right wing dictatorship, as was Brazil. Have you seen Children of God? That's the OP's point of comparison with the US. If we keep at it, we can catch up.

[lbrtbell]

8. Guns also have a purpose

Self-defense.

And it doesn't matter whether something has a purpose (in your mind) or not. The fact is, cars kill a lot of people, thanks to negligent drivers.

Swimming pools aren't needed, but look at all the drownings. Cigarettes definitely aren't necessary for anything, but they kill people every day. (My uncle is one of them; his cremains are in an urn right here at home.)

And if you're going to bring up self-inflicted deaths, you don't even want to look at Japan's suicide rate. As for the USA, most women kill themselves by overdosing instead of using a gun anyway.

I was one of many people who had the misfortune to witness online, a young man from Sweden who hanged himself in front of his webcam. You simply can't stop someone from doing something like this, if he/she is in that mental state and not being treated.

What we need is more money spent on mental health, so that people who are homicidal OR suicidal can get help before it's too late.

[BainsBane]

11. I'm all for better mental health care

but there is no statistical correlation between mental illness and perpetration of violence toward others. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525086/

Just what is it that you are so afraid of that makes you feel you need guns to protect yourself? I don't understand what it is like to be so afraid all the time. I live in the inner city, have lived in some very bad neighborhoods, and never had any problems. The only crime I've ever worried about is rape, and I carried pepper spray in case I needed it, which I never did.

If guns aren't intended to kill, they've got some serious design flaws.

By the OPs own logic, deaths by automobile and swimming pools are entirely irrelevant, since those qualify as accidents, which he says don't count.

As for cigarettes, they are heavily regulated. You can't smoke in most public places now, but you can carry guns. In fact, there is very little in our society that isn't regulated more than guns. For that, we can thank the congruence of corporate profit and whatever it is that makes you so frightened or otherwise feel you must keep weapons.

[DanTex]

15. Yes, there is a correlation between gun ownership and homicide.

Sure, there is more homicide in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, but if you compare to any country that remotely resembles the US, you find a very clear correlation. The US has by far the highest homicide rate of any wealthy nation -- Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, etc.

And there is a clear reason for this correlation. It's not that the US has more violent crime overall than these other countries. It's that crimes in the US are much more likely to be committed with guns, which in turn makes them much more likely to result in death.

By the way, the link between gun ownership and homicide also exists at the state level, as well as the level of individual counties. Here are some studies.
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dranove/htm/Dranove/coursepages/Mgmt%20469/guns.pdf
http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html