Also, if Americans had similar limitations to those in the UK wrt tools of murder it’s not beyond imagination that some of those 8000 gun murders currently might go into knives or other things (assuming you could actually get the 100’s of millions of guns off the streets in the first place)…which would change the number ratios Novelty Bobble was crafting. I think the US is much more violent than the UK or much of western Europe, and that if you took away all the guns then that violence would be reflected in other tools.
Indeed. It’s almost like murderers use whatever’s available.
Well, if you include social and institutionalised racism, as well as a universal - and a integrated, including mental health - healthcare system, I think you pose a decent question.
This is a good point and one that I think a lot of folks are missing. They were never really a thing in a LOT of other countries, so putting in very strict controls didn’t really change things that much. The much-touted controls in Australia and the buyback netted something like 600,000 guns IIRC. That’s a lot, but almost 2 orders of magnitude less than the estimated numbers of guns currently in the US. It’s not only the physical numbers, it’s the culture and attitude towards guns that is so different.
Accepting that 8 people died and the appalling nature of what they did, these three desperadoes were complete clowns. They were so bad not only didn’t terror groups want anything to do with them, they couldn’t even rent the vehicle they wanted.
The leader was so confused he wore a football team shirt, entirely the wrong ‘tribe’ for the occasion.
Had they had guns however, they would have killed dozens and even into three figures.
There are now more guns than people in the United States - The Washington Post says:
Doing some very rough extrapolation from that 357 million firearms in 2013, I would guess there are 400+ million guns in America, today, at the tail end of 2017.
you have to careful with figures when you are dealing with small numbers. The homicide rate in Switzerland is 0.69/100k, for UK it is 0.92/100k (for comparison the USA is 4.88). So they are very much comparable and it would only take a small change in either country to be pretty much equal.
You are absolutely right about the guns though, Switzerland has a gun ownership rate 4 times that of the UK, perhaps no coincidence then that they have over 10 times the number of gun deaths. Or perhaps that springs from that noted Swiss plague of discrimination and income inequality?
no it isn’t. It is 1.6/100k while the UK is 0.92/100k
Now that is true, Finland has 5.2 times the gun ownership rate of the UK, but again we see that it also has a gun death rate of over 10 times that of the UK.
I suspect that both are factors…don’t you?
that is likely but those other methods are messier, more up close and personal or less prone to spontaneity so I doubt all those 8000 would transfer.
Bolding mine, I’ll be charitable and assume you just made a bad choice of word there but I don’t appreciate the implication.
No, not at all. Everyone always shows America as some sort of high violence anomoly, but then they omit Mexico.
Trump isnt racist vs white people.
It wasn’t meant to be an insult or about witchcraft or whatever. You were showing a ratio that I think would skew differently if certain variables changed. My apologies if that came out bad.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Hard to say. I doubt that things would remain unchanged, though my guess is that with all the guns already in the US that even if we had exactly the same laws on the books as the UK the results would be a lot different than we have today…or that we’d be more in line with the results in the UK. Maybe if the number of guns went down organically it might change in the future, but as things are today I don’t think that people who are willing to traffic in, say, illegal drugs are going to be much phased by trafficking in illegal arms…or people who are willing to murder today with a gun will stint at murder using an illegal guns if a ban went in.
not a problem, it just seemed to suggest that I was making up the figures.
Nope, I accepted your figures pretty much at face value, since they seem pretty much what I expected.
Pretty much. After the Hungerford massacre in the UK, semi-auto weapons were banned. There weren’t very many of them in private hands anyway.
After Dunblane, when handguns were very severely restricted, lots were handed in under the amnesty, and lots of those were old rusty relics that a grandad or whoever had kept after a war. Handguns as home protection just wasn’t a significant thing.
And then when the Cumbria massacre happened - using a rifle and a shotgun - nothing changed. I don’t recall any great clamour for a change.
The UK has reached its equilibrium level of comfort with legally held firearms. A shotgun involves a bit of bureaucracy, and a rifle a bit more, but neither obstacle is insurmountable. Guns as tools, perhaps.
There are (most recent data) 563,413 shotgun certificates active in England and Wales, and 154,958 firearms ones. These pertain to individuals, so the number of actual weapons is much greater.
(Cite: Firearm and shotgun certificates in England and Wales: financial year ending March 2017 - GOV.UK )
Those figures don’t include Scotland (be roughly the same mix as E&W I reckon, numbers proportionate to population) or Northern Ireland (which is a whole different thing - handguns are permitted there for personal protection, for example).
You can obtain a new handgun in England, Wales and Scotland, but you’ve pretty much got to be a veterinarian who needs to humanely kill large animals.
I disagree about it not being smart. I think it’s not smart to talk about ‘gun’ homicides or murders or deaths specifically, because it leaves open a lot of room to spin things if you exclude other homicides.
For far longer than I should have, I genuinely just bought the argument that ‘if you take away guns, they’ll just use something else’. And part of the reason I bought it so easily was because I would constantly see ‘gun homicides’ and ‘gun deaths’ bandied about, which made me think ‘see how they’re cleverly wording it to avoid showing that people will still kill without the guns?’ because that’s exactly the argument that gets pushed.
I eventually learned that was a stupid argument, but it wouldn’t have stuck anywhere near as long if people didn’t focus so much on what weapon the murder was committed with and just said ‘in countries with less guns, there’s generally less murder’ or whatever the most accurate way to say it is without qualifying ‘gun crime’. Because of course there is less gun crime if there are less guns. But it looks like weasel words to avoid claiming that there’s less crime, or less murders, period. Which, when combined with people pushing exactly that perception, makes it seem like less guns does not equal less murders, it just means less murders with guns.
That’s interesting. So:
1 license per 100 people (shotguns)
1 license per 360 people (firearms)
I presume the shotguns are mostly farming/animal husbandry related …
I also wonder if police officers have to be personally licensed/certified.
Apart from it being a great time to be alive if you’re a gun manufacturer, makes you wonder what all these guns are doing.
They are not all being used for any kind of sport, including mass-murdering, most days of the week. Some are carried, and never used, for self-defence when one goes down those mean streets — although those unarmed seem to die at no greater rate than those packing heat; some are kept on the bedside table for when there is a faint knocking at the window caused by a tree branch; some are rusting away.
Notwithstanding the entertainment media ( and it is kinda odd that killing should be a staple of entertainment, even if the victims are reassuringly bad guys ) few people go in for Gun Fu, whilst even Dual Wielding seems excessively dumb, so they are perforce being used one gun at a time, even if one carries several.
Since gun-owners aren’t sitting at home all night fondling and stroking their firearms whilst calling them 'My Pretties’, ineluctably the conclusion must be that the vast majority are safely locked away in gun cabinets rarely taken out. After which they go and buy more guns.
There can be no greater time to invest in arms-making stock.
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I am not a city-dweller. I live where there are cattle farms, hunting is the norm for many people, and hunting is an important food source for small communities in my region (many of which are not road accessible other than by winter ice roads). At any given time there may be bears, wolves and coyotes on my property, and there are occasional cougar sightings a few hundred yards away at the end of my road. Long guns are the norm here, and we have effective gun control. Hand guns are few and far between because they are tightly restricted, and quite frankly, are not useful tools. Gun deaths are few and far between where I live, despite long-guns being common. If you cannot learn to live and work safely in a rural or wilderness environment without handguns, you should move to an urban area.
The closest city to me, where I work, is the murder capital of Canada (6.64/100,000 as compared to the national average of 1.68). In your country, St. Louis has a murder rate of 60.37, being ten times worse that our worst. Note that the roots of violence in both of these communities is long-standing and arose out of racialized poverty and systemic discrimination. Both our nations have severe historical and ongoing problems that have resulted in heightened murder rates in specific racialized communities, but your murder rate in such communities is off the wall compared to ours.
In your nation, the murder/non-negligent manslaughter rate is 5.4/100,000, being well over three times our national murder rate. Both our nations are first world nations, although yours is no longer a full democracy. We have a lower per capita GNI than you, and we live longer and healthier lives than you (here’s a hint: institute universal single payor health care – to results in longer lives and healthier lives at less cost to the public purse and less cost to individuals).
In short, our nations are very similar to each other, but there is a great difference in how our nations deal with guns. The rate of gun ownership is over three times that of Canada (Canada 30.8/100 v. USA 101/100), and the ownership and use of high-capacity magazines, handguns, some semi-automatics, is very tightly controlled.
Unfortunately, the USA is not willing to seriously look at the determinants of gun deaths. As mentioned up-thread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are being blocked from investigating the gun deaths crisis as a health issue. I put it to you that when a death rate of any type is grossly out of proportion to the rates of a similar type of death in similar nations, and when that grossly disproportionate death rate in the USA (12/100,000 per year including all types of gun deaths) reflects the gun deaths of roughly 39,000 people per year, you’d think that the government would move heaven an earth to fund the CDCP to do its job, but no, your government and a great many of you prefer to gury hour heads in the sand and ignore the obvious, convincing yourselves you are somehow special such that cause and effect does not apply to your gun death crisis, and that the untolled gun injuries and tens of thousands of gun deaths each year are not a health issue. The emperor has no clothes.
Yes - and pretty much always have been. There’s a gun shop within the village where I live - it’s part of a little cluster of shops that sell animal feed, outdoor clothing, horse riding tackle, etc - I think (I’ve never been in there) they sell shotguns, airguns etc for small game hunting and vermin control.
In countries with fewer guns, there are more murders. The US is an outlier on that, but only if you include only those two variables. It’s also the rare outlier on that. It’s actually rather hard to find a set of countries where the homicide rate isn’t negatively correlated to the gun ownership rate.
Once you run the math to find all the variables most closely correlated to homicide rates, the cause of US homicides is best explained by income disparity. Increasing the ownership of guns, in the US, is predicted to lower homicide rates (though, correlation does not mean causation, so that’s not necessarily true), and gun ownership is not one of the top five most useful variables for predicting the homicide rate of any country.
There are countries where a higher gun ownership rate would be predicted to increase homicide rates, but usually those are countries where if you look at the other statistics involved, they seem like they’re aching for a revolution.
Negative correlation means that as gun ownership rate decreases, the rate of homicide increases? Haven’t you got your argument the wrong way round here?
If not, do you have a cite?
cite?
predicted by who? You are saying more guns in more hands would equal less deaths? or just less homicides?
What countries do you mean? where are you getting these stats and predictions from? If they are purely your own then say so.
I live in the UK, If I make it as easy to own guns here as it is in the USA I predict we will have more homicides, I also predict this for most of western Europe. Are we all aching for revolution?