Guns, Violence & Politics

Over at 2 Crabs, my fellow American expats, no doubt as impressed as I am with the relative lack of crime here in the sceptred isles, have in the wake of the VT shootings, put up some Gun Violence Statistics. Without going into the actual sources of the statistics (The Brady Campaign can hardly be seen as an unbiased source of gun stats), I wish to interject a bit of a response to the underlying message of posting such statistics.

First, it is silly, in my opinion, to include suicides in any discussion of whether or not guns are a neutral or bad thing. Suicides are suicides, and have little to do with the method used. Yes, the easy access to handguns in the States means that more suicides will be committed with handguns, but the lack of access to a gun really doesn’t have any correlative or causal effect on the rates of suicide.

As to the actual rates of murders committed with guns, I think what is probably more useful (and telling) is the complete violent crime statistics for a country, as opposed to simply gun statistics. For instance, Nation Master has a list of murders per 1,000 people for most countries. On their list, the United States ranks 24th in the world with 0.042802 per 1,000 people, and the UK, 46th with 0.0140633 per 1,000 people, lower even than Canada (0.0149063 ), Iceland (0.0168499 ) and France (0.0173272).

As an adjunct idea here, I also find it interesting that the incidence of violent Assaults Per Capita, the numbers are far closer; with the US ranked 6th with 7.56923 per 1,000 people and the UK ranked 8th with 7.45959 per 1,000 people.

You will also find that in Total Crimes Per Capita, the situation is similar, with the UK ranked 6th in the world with 85.5517 per 1,000 people  and the US ranked 8th with 80.0645 per 1,000 people.

So perhaps one could argue that access to firearms has a tendency to make Assaults more deadly on average, but not that they cause Assaults or deaths. There are so many factors that go into the (violent) crime rate in any locality that almost any set of statistics are non-authoritative. What about Police per Capita? The UK ranks 34th in the world, the US doesn’t even show up on the rankings. There are too many factors to take into account to simply trot out some statistics, biased or not, as a reaction to, or an explanation for, something like a massacre.

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Published:
4.24.07 / 7am
Category:
Pondering
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