Why US gun deaths are high

One of the questions often asked by those supporting gun control and those who are merely uninformed alike is why the US has so many gun deaths, especially in comparison with other Western, industrialized countries.

The first reason is obvious.  There are nearly five times more people in the United States than there are in the largest European countries.  This may seem ludicrously obvious, but most people really are that stupid and don’t take population sizes into account. The fact that the news media covers all the crimes across the country it deems noteworthy means that the 310 million people in the USA are going to produce about five times more big crime stories than the 63 million in the UK.

The second reason is also related to demographics.  The specific question that was asked was why the USA has a higher rate of gun homicides, 2.97 per 100,000 population than Canada, at only 0.51 per 100,000.  After all, the USA and Canada are very similar countries, are they not?  No, they are not.  Only 3.5 percent of the Canadian population is African and Latin American.  28.9 percent of the US population is African and Latin American.  Does this make a difference?  The chart below demonstrates that this demographic difference is not only significant, but conclusive.

As per The Guardian article of July 12, 2012, the USA had 9,146 gun homicides, the fourth-most of the reporting countries.  That was considerably more than Canada or any of the European nations; Canada had only 173.  Even if one accounts for the much smaller Canadian population, it is obvious that Canadians were much less likely to shoot and kill other Canadians.  Was this because there are fewer guns in Canada, only 30.8 percent compared to the 88.8 percent in the United States?  No, it was because there are fewer African-Canadians and Latin-Canadians, as should be obvious from looking at the chart.

There were even fewer guns per capita in the two Latin countries, 11.5 percent, and in the two African countries, 8.3 percent, than Canada’s 30.8 percent, France’s 31.2 percent, or Germany’s 30.3 percent.  And yet, the gun deaths per capita in all four African and Latin countries were much higher than either Canada or the USA; on average, they were four times higher than the US rate despite there being far fewer guns, and guns per capita, in all of them.  Nor did I cherry-pick any outliers; most African nations don’t even report these figures, and based on the news reports, countries such as Congo and Nigeria are even more murderously violent than South Africa and Zimbabwe.  In Latin America alone, there are six countries with higher per capita gun death rates than Brazil, which is six times higher than the USA.

The low rate of gun ownership in these violent countries not only make it clear that the prevalence of guns cannot possibly explain the relatively high US gun death rate in comparison with other European countries, they clearly indicate that gun deaths are a predominantly racial and/or cultural phenomenon.  Since the US is on the track to become a European minority country, it should be readily apparent that as it becomes browner and blacker, it will also become more violent, naturally reflecting the more violent tendencies of the nations from whence the post-1965 immigrants have come instead of those of the European nations who originally populated the country.

If lower gun death rates are a goal, it is clear that reducing the amount of guns will not help, and may even make the matter considerably worse by disarming the law-abiding population and rendering it helpless against the lawless population.  The only way to significantly reduce the amount of gun deaths is to repatriate the immigrants who come from countries where people are disproportionately inclined to shoot other people dead.  Since most Americans presently appear to prefer higher violent crime rates to stopping immigration, much less reducing the percentage of the non-European/Asian/Arab population through deportation, logic dictates that if gun control proponents are successful in their attempts to reduce the guns per capita rate, the gun homicides per capita rate will rise in proportion to the percentage of the African/Latin population in the general population.