| You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths. If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them. E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1. Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes. But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate. This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife. Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders. What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there. Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3]. However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes. 1. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 3. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319 |
The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"?
The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading.
I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here.
The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.