Data on Gun Homicide Rates by Country

Factual Questions
1

First, I want to express my extreme sorrow and horror for what happened in Newtown. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families, the first responders, and the town. I now live near San Francisco but went to high school a ½ hour from Newtown.
I received an email saying, “Last Year, Handguns Killed 48 People in Japan.” It listed some other countries, including
52 in Canada… and…
10,728 in the United States.
There were more. The email contained the list and this picture.

I wonder where the data come from? I looked up some data and found 173 gun homicides in Canada, not 52; and 18 in the UK, not 8. I compiled a list of gun homicides in the latest year data were available and then calculated the gun homicide rate per million people to come up with this list.
Gun Homicide Rates Per Million People
398.6711: Jamaica (1,080 in 2010 / 2.709M)
395.6008: El Salvador (2,446 in 2008 / 6.183M)
178.8014: Brazil (34,678 in 2008 / 193.947M)
160.6884: South Africa (8,319 in 2007 / 51.771M)
150.7537*: Russia* (21,603* in 2009 / 143.3M)
100.6703: Mexico (11,309 in 2010 / 112.337M)
83.4759: Philippines (7,708 in 2002 / 92.338M)
29.0387: United States (9,146 in 2009 / 314.959M)
7.6672: Israel (61 in 2008 / 7.956M)
5.000: Switzerland (40 in 2010 / 8M)
4.9413: Canada (173 in 2009 / 35.011M)
1.9291: Germany (158 in 2010 / 81.903M)
1.8856: Sweden (18 in 2010 / 9.546M)
0.2891: United Kingdom (18 in 2009 / 62.262M)
0.0862: Japan (11 in 2008 / 127.547M)

    • Russia: homicides by any method, not just guns

Data Sources
Number of gun homicides:
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region
(example - http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states > Gun Death and Injury > Number of Gun Homicides)
Population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
Additionally, Wikipedia offers this list of countries by firearm-related death rate.

The email and its link (repeated here), when compared to the data on the site I found and used in the above list, point to some fundamental problems in the gun control discussion, like

Who is doing the counting, and is it consistent from country to country?
How are gun deaths and injuries counted? Who decides?

For example, if you look at that site and look up the gun homicides in Afghanistan, it lists 712 in 2008. Is that factual data? I do realize there are footnotes for the source for the data.

To have a well-informed discussion on the needed changes in our gun control laws, we need good data to analyze the related problems and draw solid conclusions on probable causes.

P.S. - I wasn’t sure if this belongs here in GQ, or is better suited to GD or IMHO. Mods, please move as needed.

2

As I said in another thread, that poster was put out in 1981 by Handgun Control Inc., which is now the Brady Campaign. As far as I know, the numbers were accurate - for 1980, and are now worse for the US.

3

I’m sure jasg is correct about the data being out of date but also the poster is very clearly referring to handgun deaths while the data from gunpolicy.org is all guns.

There’s some fine print under the numbers in the poster. Can anyone read what it says? It might be a source.

4

Meant to post the link I used to date this poster.

Here is the largest version of the poster I could find, but the text is illegible. I think it says ‘based on 1979 murders’ which is backed up by this newspaper letter to the editor about the campaign and this column.

5

Here’s a link to a summary of gun deaths from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp: Scrapping the long-gun registry: some relevant numbers - Canada’s homicide rate at lowest level since 1966

6

I would like to see something that relates gun crime to the main offending age group, or break down by age ranges.
Then it might be worth examining these by nationality - This is more likely to yield reasons for particular gun offending rates - for instance in Mexico the dynamic is quite different to UK.

We might then have some chance to ascribe the availability of weapons as a contributory factor in gun crime - some countries seem to have high gun ownership but low gun crime and vice versa, but my feeling is that there is likely to be a tendency toward reduced gun ownership is associated with reduced numbers of guns.

7

What about Australia? I hear that Australia came out with stricter gun controls and yet the murder rate was not reduced. The murder rate may even have increased. Is that true?