High school shooting in Parkland FL

[pocaracas]

I made a case a couple of pages back about how the availability of guns seemingly leads to an increase in the number of actual deaths (caused by guns).
Indeed, I didn't present stats on the overall homicide rate, regardless of the means to achieve it... but I think that it would only add one more nail in the argument that gun availability does cause more deaths.

I think I did see that, but often it's the same comments, so I may not have said anything.  Just from what you had said here, the actual number of gun deaths.This figure likely includes suicides, which account for about 2/3 of gun deaths.  The picture looks a little different when you look at gun related homicides vs the households which possess a gun.  As I had said, we can also look at homicide rates or violent crime rates before and after gun bans in other countries.  Not just gun deaths, but the total number of homicides;  I think you have less impact in your argument, if you are just shifting the means.

Well, I suggest you go there and take a look at my post (here for your commodity: https://atheistforums.org/post-1704285.html#pid1704285). I did compare specifically gun-related homicides between the US and the EU. Perhaps we could add Australia (pre- and post- gun ban) for better understanding of the effect of a ban?

I didn't care about the suicide numbers.... but they seem to follow the same pattern as homicides.

The following Chart from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_de...s_by_state shows gun murders to gun ownership.  It doesn't show the correlation that is sometimes presented. 

This is why my questions are; what are you trying to accomplish, what are you proposing, and why do you think it will work.    I live in rural Pennsylvania, where I would guess the percentage of households owning a gun is high, and many of them likely own a number of weapons.  Yet I would be far more comfortable walking around at night here, than in Washington DC (the dot way up high), which to my understanding has fairly strict gun control laws.

Isn't DC pretty much just one city? How can you compare that to other states?

The EU gets an average of 0.2 gun-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
The state closest to this in the US is Vermont, with 0.3.... again, a small state - I'm not very fond of comparing the small states with the larger ones, nor with the whole country or EU, because then we'd have to compare against individual countries and the numbers become 0.04 in Poland, 0.06 in the UK, 0.07 in Germany, 0.1 in Austria, etc...
Your Pennsylvania stands at 3.6, close to the country wide average. I think you'll agree that you'd feel much safer in the EU, even without having a gun.


What I'm trying to accomplish is to convince you that the ubiquitousness of guns is one major aspect of gun-related homicides.

What I'm proposing is the establishment of certain rules, laws, etc. that aim to lower the gun ownership in the US so as to decrease the number of gun-related homicides (and, at the same time, I'm sure it will decrease the gun-related suicides and accidents)
Which rules? Not my job. And, as a non-American, it's not my place. I've tried to present suggestions, but they all seem to be flawed at some point.
As a guy on an internet forum, the best I can do is make some people aware of the reality and hope that they pass on such awareness to their friends and neighbors and hopefully change the gun mentality and start decreasing the gun availability.