We're #1! 89 guns per 100 people in the US, 31 in Canada

[ProgressiveEconomist]

We're #1! 89 guns per 100 people in the US, 31 in Canada (#13), and 58 in Serbia (#2), according to 2007 data at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country .

Canuckistanian posted this link in http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002980013 , and I thought it deserved its own thread. These are statistics Aaron Sorkin omitted from the opening monologue in his "The Newsroom".

IMO our sorry record is safe for many years if not many decades, judging by how many guns per capita separate us from number 2.

And bear in mind these statistics embody a false equivalency between single-shot rifles for home protection and hunting and automatic assault weapons with 30-shot magazines whose entire contents can be sprayed into crowds in seconds.

WHY do we harbor and permit such absurdly unnecessary firepower in the USA?

IMO we have a society that WORSHIPS guns. Think of little George W. Bush in his favorite cowboy suit, growing up celebrating genocide against Native Americans. His fantasy became reality, first when he shot his brother with a BB gun, and later when he decided, "I wanted to be a war President" like his dad.

WHAT'S YOUR OPINION?

[Indydem]

1. And yet..

Our Murder/accidental gun rate is 4.37 /100000 meaning despite ALL of those guns, most of them are owned, handled, and used responsibly.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. In absolute terms, most European countries are in the low double digits

in the low double digits for gun homicides per year, while the US is just short of 5 digits, according to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms .

In per-capita gun homicide terms, the US multiple compared to most of the rest of the world is at least THIRTY.

What's your source of data? Does it mix gun and non-gun murders, and/or US and Canadian data?

[Indydem]

5. Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

Many guns. Not that many deaths.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

7. Look at the HOMICIDES column. 4.14 for the US, 0.07 for the UK;

a multiple of FIIFTY-NINE TIMES!

"Not that many deaths"??!

[onehandle]

2. Somebody came into my home and counted my guns!!??

Clearly, I need more guns.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

3. Self-delete--wrong place. Moved to Reply #4 above.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. "America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening

"America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization." - Oscar Wilde


Though I'm not sure about the "gone from barbarism" part.

[Canuckistanian]

8. I was always doubtful of the oft-quoted "Canada has more guns per capita than the U.S."

We don't have a crazed gun culture in Canada. We have no equivalent of the Second Amendment. There's simply no reason to have that many guns.

Of all my fellow Canadians I've encountered in my 53 years, maybe 4 people even owned a gun, and they were hunters. And handguns are only legal in the hands of LEOs. So all of those "guns" are long rifles and shotguns.

Most Canadians either on the right or the left are against relaxing regulations on acquiring weapons. And most of us don't buy guns for "self-defense".

[ProgressiveEconomist]

10. Meanwhile, we can expect spikes in US AR-15 sales, because

that was the main weapon the Aurora gunman used, and the weapon that's getting massive free advertising in mindless saturation news coverage. So many Americans seem to be fantasizing about shooting someone, and spoiling for any excuse to bring fantasy to life.

The saturation coverage of mass shootings seems to me to be the modern-day equivalent of nineteenth century hangings of pickpockets, drawing crowds and, ironically, dozens of pickpockets to ply their trade.

We hear NOTHING about comparable events in the recent past, about the end of the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004, or about the extreme rarity of gun homicides in other western countries--just nonstop glorification of crazed shooters and the weapons they employed. How many future mass shootings have the media set in motion today?

[4th law of robotics]

9. Pakistan has fewer than 12

South Africa has about 13 per 100.

If only America could be as peaceful and violence free as those countries.