Obama care

[Jackalope]

Hey, I own several guns. There a problem with that? Europeans live by this amusing mindset that if you take away the guns you'll take away the violence.

And, the facts seem to back them up in that.

http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTO...NSTAT.html

A study of firearm deaths in high income countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom (England and Wales), United Kingdom (Northern Ireland), United Kingdom (Scotland), and the United States) was conducted with data from the World Health Organization assembled by the WHO from the official national statistics of each individual country from 2003 (Richardson and Hemenway, 2011). The total population for the United States for 2003 was 290.8 million while the combined population for the other 22 countries was 563.5 million. There were 29,771 firearm deaths in the US and 7,653 firearm deaths in the 22 other countries. Of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003, 80% occurred in the US.

What were the rates before and after the countries in question "took the guns away"? In other words, are the difference in rates of violence a result of the presence of an implement of violence, or a result of something else?

As I recall, the rate of death-by-firearm was pretty damn low in both the UK and Australia prior to their gun bans. Can't say that I have any information on the other 20 countries.

The only conclusion I can draw from the above quote is that the USA is more violent than the other 22 countries, on average. There may indeed be a causal link to rate of firearm ownership - but that is not established in the above.

P.S. In the interest of heading off the kind of misunderstanding that occurred in another thread, I have no vested position on either the gun control or anti gun control side of the issue. I fully recognize that the USA has a violent crime problem that is out of line amongst other developed countries, and am interested in finding solutions that work, as opposed to those based on intuition or emotional appeal.