Sadly, in light of the recent mass killing in Santa Barbara, it’s time to post this chart again.
Here we see gun homicides (red bar) and homicides by all other means (black bar) per 100,000 people (use scale on left). The red and black bars together show the total homicide rate. “Homicide” here is defined as ”unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person.” So that does not include justifiable self-defense or justifiable killing by a police officer.
The U.S. rate of gun homicides was 10 times the average rate of peer countries. And looking at total homicides, people in other advanced countries do not appear to be swinging nearly enough hammers or wielding enough knives to rival our total homicide rate either. The only countries that exceed our rate of homicides and gun homicides are less developed, drug cartel infested countries like Columbia and Mexico. Surely, we do not want to set our bar that low!
We also have by far the highest rate of civilian gun ownership (see yellow bars and use scale on right). Some countries like Switzerland do have high gun ownership rates without an accompanying spike in homicide rates. But the Swiss also require universal background checks, licensing and training and have been moving away from widespread guns in households and instead storing guns in depots. See more about Switzerland here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Of course, societal violence is a complex problem stemming from many other diverse factors — drug trafficking, income inequality, access to mental health services, violent video games, inadequate law enforcement, you’re-on-your-own culture, to name a few. And minimizing it will therefore require a multi-pronged approach. One thing is clear: Guns are the most effective and impersonal lethal weapon available to individuals.
No doubt we need more research and data on this topic. Ever since the late 1990s, however, the Centers for Disease (and Injury) Control and Prevention has been wary of studying gun-related issues after NRA lobbyists convinced Congress to cut the CDC's funding. Sounds like a tactic ripped straight from the tobacco industry playbook.
It's interesting to note that the Japanese consume as many violent video games as Americans do, but they have very low gun ownership and homicide rates. And don't forget that all other advanced countries have lower income inequality, as well as some form of universal healthcare so everyone has easy access to mental health services. Perhaps we have a perfect storm in America of all these factors converging together to produce a toxic stew of violence. And not surprisingly, neither Teapubicans nor the NRA have a serious policy to address any of them.
In the aftermath of mass killings, other civilized countries have solved this problem (see England and Australia, for example). The only question is does the U.S. have the political will to do it?
By the way, the full 2nd Amendment reads as follows:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. (my emphasis)
The only way you can possibly interpret that sentence to imply an individual right to carry any weapon, anywhere, anytime with little to no regulation is if you ignore the entire first half of the Amendment before the second comma — especially that ”well regulated” part. And that is exactly what Supreme Court Justice Scalia and the other corporatist/regressive four did in the ludicrous 2008
Heller decision. It’s also what the NRA does on the wall of its headquarters — substituting “..” for all that inconvenient verbiage before the second comma. Hardly strict Constitutionalists! More to come on that in another diary.