Do rates of gun ownership correlate with rates of homicide? If so, then the US ought to have one of the highest murder rates in the world. Here are some comparative stats. Among other things, it's striking that a number of upscale island resorts have far higher homicide rates than the US. Does that correlate with gun ownership?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/10/world-murder-rate-unodc
And of course, Switzerland has one of the lowest, .7, but one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world—and we're not talking bulky, unwieldy, hunting riffles, but assault riffles, semi-auto handguns, like SIG, etc. To be sure, there is a regimented training process for citizens, but this is not inconsistent with the American conservative argument, but in fact part of the counterargument. And, since DC isn't a state and so gets excluded from a lot of gun crime data, we must remind liberals that DC is very liberal and has strict gun laws—more strict than Colorado—yet is almost always #1 in gun murders. Compare that to Colorado, which is in the second to worst tier of gun laws (per the Brady rankings) but which had one of the lowest gun murder rates in America (per the 2010 FBI report).
ReplyDeleteI live in CO. I've been around weapons my whole life. You need to be taught what they can do. That's all.
ReplyDelete