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Whilst I'm sure there are a lot of guns in the US, this metric sounds a little skewed: "America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of t

Whilst I'm sure there are a lot of guns in the US, this metric sounds a little skewed: "America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world" Surely any country where guns are legal to own will have a higher percentage of civilian-owned guns than it's population, because "the world's population" includes countries where guns are illegal.

ataturk 9y ago
With 300 million+ guns in the US, if guns were really a problem you would certainly know it! We don't talk about automobile deaths, which are higher than gun deaths. The NY Times made a lot of hay about gun deaths almost reaching the number of automobile deaths without accurately portraying that automobile deaths have been dropping due to technology improvements while the increase in gun deaths were in the noise compared to population increase. Also, the term "gun deaths" is so misleading--the police defending themselves against a felon firing a gun at them is counted. That's more like "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" to me. Suicides by gun are counted, too. Take out suicides and gun deaths are pretty inconsequential. Not that some aren't tragic, of course. Sadly, the people dying prematurely from gun deaths are almost all members of one particular race engaging in illegal behavior. But we can't talk about that, so I'm going to be quiet now lest I be banned.
christophilus 9y ago
Yeah. The article clearly has a slant. It's not terribly surprising to find that a country with gun rights baked into its constitution has way more guns than countries who lack such rights.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  It's about as surprising that there are more homicides using firearms in the US than countries with far fewer civilian-owned arms as it would be to find out that there are more salt-water drownings in Florida than there are in Utah.
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ataturk 9y ago

With 300 million+ guns in the US, if guns were really a problem you would certainly know it! We don't talk about automobile deaths, which are higher than gun deaths. The NY Times made a lot of hay about gun deaths almost reaching the number of automobile deaths without accurately portraying that automobile deaths have been dropping due to technology improvements while the increase in gun deaths were in the noise compared to population increase. Also, the term "gun deaths" is so misleading--the police defending themselves against a felon firing a gun at them is counted. That's more like "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" to me. Suicides by gun are counted, too. Take out suicides and gun deaths are pretty inconsequential. Not that some aren't tragic, of course. Sadly, the people dying prematurely from gun deaths are almost all members of one particular race engaging in illegal behavior. But we can't talk about that, so I'm going to be quiet now lest I be banned.

christophilus 9y ago

Yeah. The article clearly has a slant. It's not terribly surprising to find that a country with gun rights baked into its constitution has way more guns than countries who lack such rights.

LyndsySimon 9y ago
It's about as surprising that there are more homicides using firearms in the US than countries with far fewer civilian-owned arms as it would be to find out that there are more salt-water drownings in Florida than there are in Utah.

deleted 9y ago

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