Reply #75: Not a good statistic...

[krispos42]

I checked out some info on the FBI's website. It looks like in 2003 there were slightly less than 15,000 homicides in this country. Slighty less than 10,000 were caused by guns in one fashion or another.

The real question here is does banning guns reduce homicides?

Of course homicides by guns go down as they are removed from the public. That is obvious. I bet there are very few people killed by horse-drawn chariots every year as well. Not because chariots have gotten safer, but because there are few chariots running around. I also bet that fewer people die per capita from frostbite in Arizona than in North Dakota. If you remove the manner of potential death from a population, then the deaths caused by that potential will decrease.

I bet that Germany also has a really low rate of handgun suicide. They probably have a comperable suicide rate to us, but the anti-gun advocate would note only the really low handgun-suicide rate and ignore the drastically higher rates by jumping, pills, and self-mutilation.

Those countries mentioned above are not known for gun rights, and have a low number of guns per capita. The question is are homicide rates per capita that much better? In the US, we have 15,000 homicides in a population of some 280,000,000, or about 5.35 per hundred thousand people per year. Is Germany better or worse?


There are some 220 million firearms in this country, which represents some 60%+ of the total worldwide civilian firearm population. I'm pretty sure we don't have 60% of all firearm homicides.