MAMEWorld Forums - Welcome to the War Room

> > Well the proof's in the pudding. The US has a far higher homicide rate than
> > Australia. The Philippines, another place where people carry handguns everywhere,
> > regularly has bar fights escalating into gunfights in major cities. It's all very
> > well for you to talk about it in the abstract like this, but you haven't given a
> > single data point that actually supports your position.
>
> https://ijr.com/2016/01/510415-10-charts-that-put-obamas-gun-violence-town-hall-in-perspective/
>
> It seems that the rate for gun ownership is the highest in the U.S compared to the
> rest of the world. But the rates for homicides are below countries such as Brazil,
> Mexico, and Russia.

The graph is misleading:

Guns per person is pointless statistic, because it's skewed by a small number of people with large numbers of guns. A better statistic is the percentage of the population with access to a firearm, which is about the same across Australia, Sweden and the US.
The graph shows gun homicides, not total homicides, which isn't particularly helpful.
It also intentionally chooses a year where there was a spike in gun homicides as the starting point to make it look better.

I've attached a graph of total US homicide rate per year per 100,000 people from 1950 to 2014 (data sourced from here). You had a massive increase in homicides from the 1960s, with a bit of a reprieve in the 1980s, and then since the 1990s it's gone down to roughly where it started. Now it's nice that the doubling of homicide rate has been reversed, but what caused it in the first place?

Don't you think comparing to Brazil, Mexico and Russia is a little disingenuous? Brazil has had politically instability for decades, Mexico has crippling poverty, and Russia is still dealing the fallout of the fall of an ideology followed by the oligarchy installed by (CIA-backed) Yeltsin.

Besides, I'm not saying gun ownership leads to more shootouts, I'm saying that a significant proportion of the population carrying guns around with them leads to increased chance of heated situations escalating into gunfights. Even after brining the homicide rate down from the high rates of the '80s and '90s, the US still has three times the homicide rate of Australia. The proportion of people with access to licensed guns is pretty similar across the two countries. The big difference is that Australians don't carry their guns around with them in general.

[ATTACHED IMAGE - CLICK FOR FULL SIZE]