Killing Spree in AL

[mrstickball]

TruckOSaurus said:

The only thing I get from this graph is that every country's number of intentional firearm deaths loosely follows a pattern according to percentage of household with a gun except for the US which is abnormally high. Why it is that way though, I have no idea.

Here's the issue: We're not debating if firearms cause firearm injuries or death. Of course they do. What we're debating is if more guns cause crime. The problem is that the graph that was given does not provide any data that actually helps that claim. Given the data sets, it's not trying to correlate crime, homicides, or murders to the number of households with guns. Only the number of households with guns vs. the number of crimes comitted with guns. If you have more of something - cars, guns, alcohol, drugs, knives, sports, ect, you will have more accidents, or what not.

That's why his chart is totally moot. Wouldn't a better chart be to compare murder rates per capita, to firearms per capita to see if there's a correlation between gun ownership and murders?

Here's what I have for a Guns & Crime aggregate. I gathered 'List of Countries by Gun Ownership' and 'Murders Per Capita, By Country' to give a trend line of asking if more guns = more murders. In this listing (which contains as many countries as I could find)

Now, as you can see with this list I created, firearm ownership DOES NOT correlate with higher murder rates per capita. In fact, the inverse is true. As the number of firearms per capita slightly increases (or if you want to talk statistics, it may be static, as it increases from 21% to 28%), the number of murders per capita goes down very rapidly. Thus showing that more guns = less crime. Cut it how you like, but I included as many countries in this as possible that were on both lists.

I used the following countries and data points for this analysis:

 

Country	Firearm Ownership	Murders Per Capita
South Africa	13.1	0.496008
Mexico	15	0.130213
Ukraine	9	0.094006
Thailand	16	0.08008
United States	90	0.042802
India	4	0.034408
Finland	32	0.028336
France	32	0.017327
Austrailia	15.5	0.015032
Canada	31.5	0.014906
United Kingdom	5.6	0.014063
Italy	12.1	0.012839
Spain	11	0.012246
Germany	30	0.011646
New Zealand	26.8	0.011152
Switzerland	46	0.009214
Greece	23	0.007593
Saudi Arabia	26.3	0.003975

Please note that's firearm ownership per 100 people, and murder rates per 1,000 people.

Now, I'd like all the reasonable gun-control advocates to provide similar lists refuting this. Feel free to give me more data points, as this list may be incomplete, but I gathered as much data from those 2 lists as possible.

If you'd like another view of it that's larger: click here