WhiteRabbit's Braindump

Recently I was discussing guns, violence and Michael Moore's movie "Bowling for Columbine" with an American I play on-line with, and he challenged Moore's statistics. I found these statistics, then wrote a small script to sort and derive some other things. Here's the general results I came up with, for the world to know:

As I remember it, Moore claims that the States has a much higher rate of gun death than other countries. He talks in absolute numbers, which is of course misleading, the States having one of the highes population in the Western world...

However, if you compute the absolute numbers, it does make the US look bad:

(I'm only keeping those countries for which we have gun ownership statistics).

On second thought, I think Moore was talking about 25,000 gun deaths or something like that... which we find by adding the suicide in there:

But then the runners-up have higher numbers than I remembered, and I think counting suicide for the purpose of knowing whether to have gun control or not is just wrong anyway. I don't think that suicides should enter in the balance at all. When talking about gun control, I'd excpect most people just don't want to see people kill others using guns, rather than using guns to kill themselves. I'd think people intent on killing themselves will do so anyway they can.

To me, the only interesting statistics to extract from there, for that purpose, is the proportion of gun homicides compared to the proportion of gun ownership; I'll add the general homicide rate while I'm at it:

I'd be keen to remove Northern Ireland as being a special case (1994, I believe there was still a lot of problems with the IRA, hence few people having guns but using them a lot...)

So, with the exception of the Netherlands, Italy and N. Ireland, there does seem to be a general trend that countries that have more guns also have more gun homicide (i.e. the countries at the top of the list on the left are also top of the list in the middle). However, it seems to me there is almost no correlation between the % of gun ownership and the homicide rate. Hence, my own conclusion is: guns are used to commit homicides (the more guns there are, the more they will be used to kill people), but having guns does not make people commit homicide. Therefore, we'll have to find another reason to justify the States being at the top of the homicide charts.

To be fair with Moore, after watching Bowling for Columbine I didn't feel like it was gun ownership that was cause of the problem. However, while the homicide rate we see in the chart is still almost twice as high as the "rest of the pack," 5 times higher than France for example, that's not even an order of magnitude, which he did seem to suggest.

However, the observations I do above would suggest that if we suppressed guns entirely, murderous Americans would probably just switch to using something else. Like gun supporters say, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."