[RyanMcGreal]

America has got to be the only country in the industrialized world where it seems reasonable to respond to mass shootings (and shootings in general) by suggesting that more people should have guns.

Here's a scatter plot of firearms per 100,000 and gun homocides per 100 for OECD countries:

http://i.imgur.com/ZAI3T.png

Needless to say, the dot in the top right corner is the USA>

Data is from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homi...

(Note: Mexico is excluded because its rate of gun violence is such a startling outlier that it squashes all the other values.)

[GVIrish]

Excluding Mexico is a huge disservice because Mexico actually has stricter gun laws than the US. Mexico's gun murder rate is over 3 times greater than that in the US.

I feel this is instructive because with all of the guns already in private hands in the US if they were banned outright today you'd end up with an enormous and uncontrollable black market. The same type of black market that exists in Mexico.

Even in the US now, the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained guns. Something on the order of greater than 90%.

[RyanMcGreal]

> Excluding Mexico is a huge disservice

Fair enough - the only reason I took it out was because it squashed all the other values into the bottom left corner so that you could no longer distinguish their relative positions. I still made sure to mention it because Mexico's case is instructive.

[jack-r-abbit]

The scale on that graphic is a little misleading. The spacing on the "gun homicides per 100K citizens" compared to the "firearms per 100 citizens" makes it look like the US has twice an many deaths as the next lowest just like they have twice as many guns. I don't know who is represented by the dot at 2.25 "gun homicides per 100K citizens" but the statistical difference between 2.25 and 3 when compared to 100K is not much. While that same dot represents 10 "firearms per 100 citizens". THAT dot seems to have a horrific kill rate. The US has 9 times more "firearms per 100 citizens" yet less than 1 additional "gun homicides per 100K citizens". Who is that dot?

Edit: Not saying the scale is misleading on purpose... just that it is misleading.

[grecy]

I believe this is because America was founded by violence, and the "I'll shoot you if you try to take what's mine" mentality that continues to this day.

It's not a peaceful place.

[jbattle]

Sorry - that's a pretty silly argument. Countries that formed through some form of peaceful negotiated settlement exist, but most formed either through conquest, revolution, or through an imposed partition. I don't have numbers on this, but running through examples in my head, especially for the developed countries I'm familiar with, I can only think of a handful.

I'm not sure what you have in mind when you say "founded by violence"...

Australia was at least as wicked with their aboriginal populations - and has a vastly lower level of gun violence.

The Netherlands was birthed in a revolution lasting 8 decades, and also has negligible gun violence.

[grecy]

Australia had neither a War of Independence, nor a Civil War.

Fun Fact: Most Australian's don't know the name of the first Prime Minister because it was so uneventful. A bunch of people sat down, signed some papers, and Australia was founded as a country.

[RyanMcGreal]

Lots of countries were founded by violence. Europe, for example, was convulsed by violence for most of the past thousand years leading right up to the middle of the last century.

One big difference in the USA is that the right to own guns was somehow inserted into its Constitution among the rights to expression, assembly, fair trial and so on. I can't think of any other countries in which owning a gun is explicitly listed among the set of human rights.

[hga]

It starts from the foundational document, the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

We have rights to life and liberty, and the right to private ownership of weapons acknowledged in the 2nd Amendment is an instrumentality to help ensure that. It should also be noted that the Bill of Rights (1st though 10 Amendments) were a price demanded by the Anti-Federalists for accepting the Constitution.