OT: Americans love their guns

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

Steve Lamb <grey at despair.dmiyu.org> wrote previously:
|If guns were such a overriding factor why is it the UK has as high
|if not higher rate of gun related violence than the US?

I guess the answer is that this belief is absurdly far from the truth,
so it probably cannot be "explained" in that sense.

The USA gun fatality rate is about 10.4 per 100k.  The UK has a rate
considerably below 1 per 100k.  It's true, however, that Guy Ritchie
made some violent films about brits, so maybe that's where the imagined
rates come from.

For US rate, see:

    http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10.html

I nice comparison of various countries is at:

    http://www.dvc.org.uk/~johnny/dunblane/homemain.pdf

In particular, look at the chart on p.4.  Somewhat of an anomoly is that
Switzerland, which has nearly half the gun ownership rate of USA has
less than 1/4 the gun homicide rate (still, the Swiss with their lots
more guns than UK, thereby have lots more murders than UK).  New Zealand
and Australia are lower in both rates, but the proportions are even more
skewed.

So while the mere correlation between gun ownership and gun violence is
not perfect, all those countries with vastly lower gun ownership rates
have vastly lower homicide rates.

Yours, Lulu...

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