These Charts Prove There Is Something Profoundly Wrong With How The US Handles Guns
Today several voices involved in the gun debate are testifying before the Senate Judiciary committee regarding gun control and rights.
Still, it's important to remember that the U.S. gun control debate doesn't take place in a vacuum, and that other countries have taken action already on this issue.
The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rates in the world and the second highest rate of gun deaths among industrialized nations. That's not a coincidence. Looking at developed nations, the U.S. is the end point of a staggering trend where the higher the rate of gun ownership, the more people die from gun wounds.
Mark Reid, a machine learning researcher at Australian National University, has run a quick statistical analysis of gun death data in industrialized nations.
His charts show how unique the U.S. is among its peers when it comes to the way the country handles guns.
The first chart shows gun deaths per capita graphed against gun ownership per capita. Notice the upward trend — the more guns per capita, the more gun deaths per capita. The U.S. has the most guns, and one of the highest rates of gun deaths.
Digging a little deeper, Reid realized that the strangely high rankings of gun deaths in countries like Switzerland and Finland were due to high suicide rates.
When it comes to homicides and gun ownership rates, Mexico and the United States are far apart from the pack, with ownership rates and death rates that skew the axes of the entire chart.
Moreover, it's worth noting that Mexico is in a full-scale drug war, rendering their gun control laws abjectly unenforceable. Despite the relatively low number of guns per capita there, the drug-related violence has driven up the homicide numbers.
Below is the chart that Reid made of strictly gun homicides:
You can see a close-up of the countries that aren't the U.S. or Mexico on Reid's site.
Reid's final chart is also interesting. In order to find nations similar to the United States and Mexico on guns, you have to allow every country in the world into the data set, even ones with ongoing wars:
