Friday, May 9, 2008

Anti Math

The US accounts for approximately 40% of civilian firearm ownership in the world. Since it's regularly claimed that guns cause crime, one would then expect the US to have 40% of the worlds firearm homicides or deaths.

IANSA states that there are about 1000 firearm deaths/day, 250 of which are of a military nature. The remainder are homicides (560), suicides (140), and unintentional (50).

So let's do some crunching.

US firearm homicides/day (34)/World firearm homicides/day (560)= 6.1%

A discrepancy of 33.9% if guns cause crime.

US firearm suicides/day (~46.5)/World firearm suicides (140) = 33.3%

A discrepancy of 6.7% if guns cause suicide.

US firearm unintentional and unknown deaths/day (2.77)/ World unintentional firearm deaths/day (50) = 5.5%

A discrepancy of 34.5%.

So the US is missing about 190 homicides, 10 suicides, and 17 unintentional deaths by firearm/ day according to the anti's own numbers. So while the US does have a higher number of suicides by firearm than many nations, it does not have higher suicides overall nor does it equal the percentage of ownership. The US also only accounts for about 1/20th of the firearm homicides and accidents when the anti logic says it should be 8x higher.

So since the private ownership of firearms isn't 'causing' firearm crime or deaths, isn't 'causing' crime of any sort, and industrialization isn't a common factor, perhaps there are other factors involved.

But that would involve groups like IANSA, Brady Campaign, and the VPC taking off their blinders.

1 comment:

mikee said...

Deaths by gunshot are not the correct metric, anyway. You and the anti-rights folks should both include all gunshot wounds that do not kill in your statistics, primarily because if I get shot in Baltimore across MLK Boulevard from the University of Maryland Trauma Center, I have a better chance of living than if I get shot in, say, Botswana.