Addicted to the Bang: The Neuroscience of the Gun

“If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you get a population roughly the size of the United States, where, last year, there were 32,000 gun death. Those other countries, which all have a form of gun control, had a total of 112. —paraphrase, Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing, 2001

I haven't gotten around to reading your entire post yet, but I did read this much and I have to address it. It seems pretty obvious that gun control would reduce the number of gun deaths (less guns=less gun deaths). However, that doesn't really help anything if the number of other deaths increases. The net result is the same.

For the sake of ease, I'm going to use statistics for intentional homicide rather than deaths in general, and I don't think this will necessarily detract from the point. According to the quote above, those countries had 0.35% of the gun deaths that our country had, which is a fact that I'm not necessarily disputing. It could in fact be wrong, but I haven't investigated this. For the purposes of my point, I'm assuming that the quoted statistic is right, and I'm attempting to show how it is misleading. Also, I will cite my source at the end of this post.

I took the liberty of plotting the raw number if intentional homicides in our country along with the countries listed in the quote between the years of 1996-2009 (the available data). You can see this graph below.



If you calculate the percentage of our intentional homicides that those countries had, this is the result for those years.



As you can see, it's around 25% (closer to 20% now). Still a pretty clear difference, but not nearly as extreme as the initial quote implies to someone who isn't paying attention to detail.

http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-...istics2012.xls