Sorry. Do you like one of these better?
Guns per million inhabitants
Venezuela 110,000
Guatemala 130,000
Paraguay 170,000
Uruguay 320,000
U.S.A. 890,000
Well, it is kind of a stupid figure that you are using basically to cherry pick a big scary number (or what you obviously think is big and scary). The fact is, many gun owners own several guns (while many households in the US have zero)…often large numbers of them in collections…which means you are doing the equivalent of talking about US wealth per person. Roughly, that would be $200,000 dollars per person if we used a similar comparison (the US is worth roughly $100 trillion after all). Is that meaningful, and if so, what does it demonstrate exactly? A better metric would be what percentage of households in the US have a gun (maybe looked at over time)…then compare that to numbers of households in other countries that have guns. Kind of changes the answer and gives a more nuanced one at that.
Since this was a response to me quibbling about the uniqueness or whatever of the US ‘gun culture’, I don’t think the number of firearms per capita really means anything. Certainly, there are more guns in the US, per capita than any other country…doesn’t make us unique, it makes us rich AND tolerant of private ownership. But there are other countries that are tolerant of private gun ownership that just aren’t as rich that are similar.
As I said, I only semi-disagree with the whole gun culture being unique to the US meme…I think that it has some truth behind it, since guns are looked at differently in the US than just about every other nation.
I just saw a snippet of an interview with the guy whose father was told “whites don’t kill whites” and he said his father was kinda like ok and watched the shooter leave. I don’t know who did exchange gunfire with the shooter, but per this guy, it wasn’t his father.
Understand the psychology of a society that accepts individual gun ownership as a “right”. A firearm is an extension of the self. People who own firearms have, whether they realized it or not, accepted that they are embracing violence.
I think that’s what Americans don’t understand about themselves. The decision to own a gun, to tolerate gun ownership, is a decision to accept gun violence.
I think we understand ourselves just fine. Prohibition, the war on drugs, past gun bans (looking at DC & Chicago in particular): Americans aren’t all that good at following rules that ban things. I think we get that about ourselves, at least at some level. We realize that banning guns would not end gun violence any more than the war on drugs ended drug use or Prohibition ended the consumption of alcohol.
HurricaneDitka, in 1996 Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement (NFA). This banned semi-automatic firearms, pump-action rifles and shotguns - some 650,000 were bought back by the Australian government.
In the fourteen years following, as of the time of this report (PDF), there had been no mass shootings in Australia, as opposed to 13 in the 18 years prior to the NFA. I’ll just go ahead and quote a bit more here:
{edited to remove citation numbers and a link}
Now, a question - would you be willing to give up your semi-automatic weapons, and accept heavy restrictions on general gun licensing and storage, to reduce the firearm homicide death toll by some 40%?
It probably depends. What happens to the non-firearm homicide death toll? If giving up my RKBA saves ~4,000 lives I’d at least entertain the idea. If giving up my RKBA just ensures that 4,000 people are stabbed / beaten to death rather than shot, I wouldn’t be particularly interested.
That’s even more worrisome. If you are suggesting that the need to own a gun is stronger than the needs of non-alcoholics and non-stoners, do you not see a wee problem there?