High school shooting in Parkland FL

[CapnAwesome]

For those who can't compare numbers, I give you... numbers!

Instead of comparing the US with individual countries, like some of you like to point out that Norway had this, Sweden had that, France had another gun shooting... how about we throw in the whole of the EU?
The EU has some 500 million people.
The US has some 325 million people.

Gun laws vary a bit throughout the EU, but not a lot.

According to this https://www.flemishpeaceinstitute.eu/sit..._in_eu.pdf, the EU has approximately 6,700 gun related deaths per year. Of which some 5,000 are suicides, 1,000 are homicides and the remaining 700 are unspecified (accidents?)
Guns exist in the EU and they do cause people to die.

So, the EU gets something like 1,000 homicides per 500 million people, or to put it in nicer numbers: 200 homicides per 100 million people.

How does the US fare?
According to this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41488081, the US has some 31,000 gun related deaths per year. Of which 20,000 are suicides, 10,000 are homicides and about a thousand are unspecified.

In homicides, the US get 10,000 for a population of 300 million, or 3,300 homicides per 100 million people.


Clearly 3,300 is larger than 200. That means that 15 times more people are killed in the US than in the EU, on purpose, with a gun.
Clearly, whatever distinguishes the US from the EU leads to an increase in homicides.


The psychological state of the people should be disregarded, as that is supposed to be roughly equivalent across both populations.
Socio-economics probably plays an important role here, given the stressful nature of US health care and retirement plans, compared to the EU's.
But the action to take a gun and kill someone else... that requires the gun to be present. And this is the major difference between the US and the EU.

According to this http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publ...383_en.pdf, 5% of EU citizens own a firearm and other 5% claim to have owned one. 90% never owned a gun.

According to this http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/2...ownership/, 30% of US citizens own a gun.... no mention of past ownership, but they do say that 11% of those who don't own guns lives with someone who does own one.

Just comparing present gun owners, 5% in the EU vs 30% in the US, there are 6 times more gun owners in the US.
Put that next to our previous ratio of 15 more homicides in the states and you see that the increase in gun ownership correlates with (more than) twice the increase in homicide rate.
Of course, correlation does not imply causation...

I think the US needs to have a revolution of attitude towards guns. Once that is done, the legislation follows.
Based on all of these numbers, I feel immensely safer living in the EU than I would in the US.
Of course, overall, there is a relatively low risk of any one person in particular dying due to a gun. 3,300 per 100 million, that's 3/100,000, or 0.003%
While, in the EU, the same risk is of 0.0002%. One order of magnitude lower! That's significant.

When 2/3 of gun related deaths are suicides, it's a hard sell to say regulating guns is going to prevent any of those.

That's why it's a nonsense statistic. What other stat groups suicides, murders and accidents together.

No guns would prevent all of the accidents, none of the suicides and some of the murders. It's only the last number that needs to be debated. So it needs to be three statistics to have any value whatsoever.

That statistic drives me crazy when people use it, because it's such obvious propaganda, that people regularly use. Like when people compare the gun deaths of the us and uk, but not the murder rate, which is obviously the important stat. (Btw, not accusing you of the latter, at least, but it is done regularly)