Maybe something about the US's culture, economy, demographics, policing methods, or some other factor other than guns, makes Americans more likely to kill.
I honestly can't think what. The demographics have changed wildly since early days, economy's been generally better than ours (or anyone else's) which should reduce the murder rate, culturally similar to UK overall... the main difference is you have readily available guns. We're talking deaths due to guns, remember - I don't believe the per capita non-gun-related deaths are very dissimilar?
Also the figure doesn't break down how many of the gun deaths are deaths of violent criminals (or would be violent criminals in self defense).
I'd shed no tears to see every violent criminal permanently removed from the ranks of the living. But I doubt the number's really that high... and how many, equally, might be people shot because someone *thought* they might be a violent criminal?
56% of the American gun deaths were from suicides. They may well have killed themselves with another method if guns where hard to find (assuming gun control would actually make it difficult to get guns)
If the means is less simple, the numbers would probably fall. Thanks for finding the number, and at least this reduces the 'gun-related death rate' to merely ~200x from 400x. I assume you think it on balance a good thing to reduce the number of suicides, however?
And yes, gun control does make it harder to get guns...
the sucide rate is highly variable in different countries US vs UK? I don't have figures.
As for accidental deaths if their are more guns its not surprising that the number of accidents with guns also goes up.
So, is it worth removing the contributing factor in so many deaths - this is one of the points of my argument! |
