Canada has about 30 guns/100 residents whereas the US has about 88 guns/100 residents. These ratios are not even remotely similar.
Don
But does that take into account “multiple ownership”? Ex: my neighbor owns 8 guns. Seriously. Wouldn’t a more valid measure be “gun owners/100 residents”? I think if you look at that figure you will find that the numbers are much closer.
In Switzerland, every adult man is obliged to have a gun at home – this is part of his military duty.
From the News site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
Reporter Leigh Sales and wires (animal rescue group): Posted August 29, 2007
Australia has one of the lowest rates of gun ownership in the world, according to the annual Small Arms Survey, released in Europe overnight.
The independent research project, based at the Graduate School of International Studies in Geneva, catalogues weapons production, stockpiles and illicit arms transfers.
In recent decades the [Australian] Government has tried to reduce civilian gun ownership, notably through a weapons buyback scheme after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996.
It has worked, with figures estimating there are only about 15 guns per 100 Australians.
In comparison, the United States has an estimated 90 guns for every 100 civilians - the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.
On the other hand, total firearm-related death rates
(per 100,000 population in one year) are:
South Africa 74.57
United States 10.27
Switzerland 6.4
Australia 2.94
"In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Orson Welles, as “Harry Lime” in Carol Reed’s movie «The Third Man». His speech is that of a criminal murderer and a cynic, so the audience is meant to take it with a large grain of salt.
JT
My salt, I would rather live in a society that makes a clock and lives in peace than a society that makes an atomic clock and has a finger on a trigger that could end the world. But, I do actually live in the latter. Sigh.
Let me repeat myself.
Quantity per person is invalid if multiple ownership is possible Valid data for valid arguments.
Well the phrasing is “guns per civilians”, not “civilians with guns out of all civilians”. So it’s not a count of how many people in 100 own a gun, 80/90 would be extremely exaggerated. Here is the article.
Another way to put it, according to the data in the article, is that U.S. civilians own roughly 30% of all the known firearms in the world. But, I don’t believe this directly makes a society more violent. I would summon another host of factors than that, more psychological than whether or not you can easily dispatch someone.
Wait a minute, where did that topic go?
The way the statistics are presented distort the real picture. Of the gun owners I know, all own at least 5. Slug shotgun, shot shotgun, small caliber rifle, large caliber rifle, pistol. All are used for hunting. Now I know 20 hunters and that makes 100 guns. Not a single one has killed a person.
While it sounds trite, the statement “guns don’t kill people, people do” is accurate. What really needs to be understood is that the US has more criminals than other “first world countries”. The fact that they have guns is secondary to the real problem. Bad people are bad. Fix that and the guns are no more deadly to humans than a butter knife.
Right, the problem is why are there so many criminals, and we do also have a very bad problem of over-criminalising behaviour which is a big part of that I feel. Someone ends up in jail for something which honestly wasn’t really hurting society or anyone around them any more than say, buying Nike shoes do, and now you’ve put them into the criminal world and it’s very difficult to get out of that once you’ve been branded. A simple non-criminal punishment would have sufficed, then spice up ordinary low-level criminal activity by turning law enforcement into a paramilitary force with near unchecked power, finally add a dash of an overall under-payed, over-worked (so many people in this country have no vacation time, ever, and very very few have four or more week per year) population that ends up with a high stress-generated rate of mental disorder and heavy chemical dependency to counter said disorders and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for a violent society as the threshold at which one might engage in truly violent or antisocial behaviour is significantly raised. Guns have very little to do with it, that’s more just a cultural quirk in this equation.
Well said.
One of the things I am constantly at odds with my management chain over is the “under-employed” in my team. Guys with 20+ years experience working as hourly contract labor in a system engineering environment. No vacation. No benefits. Kids in college. Getting old with associated health issues. These guys will work 60hr without a word. I tell them to leave a bit early to thank them for meeting arbitrary deadlines and somehow I am the one that is stealing from the company. No one seems to think that taking 20hr of their time is stealing.
But we have digressed even further.
The point is that objects are not the problem in any society. It is the social platform which creates the problems. We can continue to look at guns or knives or drugs as the issue and fix nothing or we can question the assumptions that have been foisted upon us and find a real problem to fix.
I shall now put my soapbox back under my bed.
I like the Leuchtturms a lot, but another really nice notebook for fountain pen users is the Rhodia notebooks. The paper quality is nicer then the Leuchtturms, but they have fewer pages (192 vs 250) and are more expensive.
I was able to find the Leuchtturms on Amazon. I’m not sure if their stock would be radically different outside of the United States.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” --Mark Twain
Wiki said this quote may have come from 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, but Twain is where I heard it, so that’s where I’m giving the credit.
I really wish that Jenny hadn’t mentioned this website. I keep ordering gorgeous notebooks of various descriptions from them, and I can’t think of anything to write down on paper! I think I just like buying stationery. Maybe I should set up a little shop with my surplus supplies… 