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I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both

I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both per 100k). The lowest groups are 2-7 and 0.5-1.4, respectively, both of which are significantly higher than the value for the Netherlands. In fact, your link shows the exact opposite of what you claim: there isn't a single county in the US that has lower gun death or gun homicide ratio than the entirety of the Netherlands. That's an exaggeration, too (there isn't data for all counties), but it doesn't diminish the point that you're by far less likely to get shot in the Netherlands than in a comparable US city.

avar 10y ago
You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths. If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them. E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1. Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes. But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate. This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife. Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders. What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there. Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3]. However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes. 1. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 3. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319 https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think. The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"? The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading. I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here. The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.
  - avar 10y ago
    This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude. What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead. The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation. That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun. So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3]. Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

avar 10y ago

You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths. If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them. E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1. Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes. But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate. This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife. Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders. What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there. Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3]. However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes. 1. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 3. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319 https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319

lorenzhs 10y ago
Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think. The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"? The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading. I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here. The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.
- avar 10y ago
  This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude. What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead. The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation. That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun. So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3]. Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...