Mar 24 2011
Who’s safer?
In the legislative discussion about requiring that guns to allowed on Idaho college and university campuses everywhere but in undergrad dorms (an odd exclusion by itself), Representative Ken Roberts, R-Donnelly, had this to say:
“It’s one of the basic facts that keeps America safer today than any other nation in the world. It’s because the citizens are armed.”
Problem is, it’s not a fact. It’s a falsehood. We’re plenty armed all right, but we’re nowhere close to the safest.
Here’s one statistical example of the point: “Given the virtually unregulated access to guns in the US, it’s actually surprising that there aren’t more than 80-90 gun deaths and 200-300 injuries everyday. There are an average of 30,000 gun deaths and 100,000 gun injuries each year. The average US annual firearm fatality rate is 10.6 per 100,000 population which is more than the entire industrialized world combined.”
And in the Idaho State Journal, of the safest-in-the-world remark: “It must be a world that doesn’t include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark or Sweden, among others. The overall homicide rate in those nations is about eight times less than the U.S. per 100,000 people. Murder rates involving firearms are five to 16 times lower in those countries.”
But no. It’s not politically correct these days to admit that we can ever learn anything from someone else in the world.
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On the other hand, Randy, there’s no evidence to indicate that gun laws are the sole or even primary factor is lower violence rates for those countries. They all happen to be countries where the quality of life and medical care are greater and the poverty disparities are lower. I would point to the latter, for example, as the primary factors in hour high violence rates.