Gun Control and Gun Violence

In the United States, where we hold our right to guns inviolate, the state with the lowest rate of firearm homicides, New Hampshire, has 0.43 gun homicides per 100,000 population per year. In the United Kingdom, where under current law private possession of firearms is essentially illegal, the entire nation has only 0.1 firearm homicide per 100,000 population per year. Note that our nation as a whole has more like 3.56 gun homicides per 100,000 per year, and the worst state, Louisiana, has 10.13 per 100,000 per year.

In the United Kingdom, police officers do not carry guns. Both the police and the public are in favor of this state of affairs. Think it might have something to do with the fact that there are very few guns in Britain, and very little gun violence? Nah, it couldn't be that...

ALSO: Total murder rates in the U.S. and the U.K. are, respectively, 5.0 and 1.28. That's a difference of 3.72 murders/100,000/year. The difference in gun murders is about 3.46/100,000/year. Those are very similar numbers. So the oft-repeated claim that people will just find some other way to kill people seems, based on this admittedly trivially small sample size, to be wrong. When you stop people killing with guns, at least based on this one-to-one comparison, they just stop killing people. It is very nearly the case that the rates of non-gun-involving murders in these two countries are identical, and the only difference is that in our nation, our god-fearing, gun-loving nation, you add three times the level of non-gun violence in firearm homicides. That's it. Our nations have almost identical murder profiles, except that in this country we add an extra 300% in gun violence.