United States Guns Per Population (#1) Versus Gun Deaths Per 100,000 (#11)
Even on this Board, many gun rights activists make the arguments that guns do not kill people, people kill people, therefore gun control measures are misguided. Of course, by that same argument, gun controls do not necessarily affect guns, which are inanimate objects, but they control people's use and access to guns, since people kill people, but I guess this is besides the point.
I guess the issue is whether there is a correlation between access and number of guns compared to gun violence. The United States is far and away the leader when it comes to number of guns and access to guns with about 100 guns per 100 inhabitants. The next closest country is Serbia, which has 75/100 and following Serbia, the next countries are all under 40 guns per 100 inhabitants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
However, when it comes to gun deaths, the U.S. ranks at #11. Of course, this puts the U.S. in the company of many war torn or unstable countries such as Honduras or Venezuela.
Conversely, countries that have low rates of gun ownership also tend to have low rates of gun related deaths. South Korea has about 1.1 gun per 100 people and 0.08 deaths per 100,000 people. Japan has about 0.6 guns per 100 people and about 0.6 guns per 100 people.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The driver was a) removal of lead from gasoline, and b) giving women cheap and ready access to family-planning services.
Removing lead from gasoline in the early 70's mean that the concentration of lead in people born after the removal was sharply lower than before. This sharply reduced cases of lead poisoning, which causes among other things the victim to be aggressive, dumb, and violent. Kids born in the mid-70's onwards breathed cleaner air, and when they reached teenage-hood in about 1990, (the prime age for violence is mid-teens to mid-20s) the population of violence-inclined teenagers was far smaller, and thus the crime rate dropped.
The widespread use of birth control (e.g., the pill, the IUD, and the diaphram) and abortion services in the late 60's onward reduced the number of children born in situations where they were more likely to become violent criminals. Again, in the late 80's onwards this also acted to reduce the population of violence-inclined teenagers and thus the crime rate.
Both of these things were the result of our progressive agenda, and did a far better job of stopping gun violence then any gun control bill. It addressed the CAUSE of the situation, rather than trying to affect the hardware commonly used in the situation.
Generally speaking there should be a relationship; after all, nobody in Florida dies in snowmobile accidents and nobody in Minnesota dies from fanboat accidents. But violence with guns is a subset of violence and the causes are far more complex than the simple existence of guns.
Yet, gun-fanciers can’t understand why we think there is a problem.
