13 Dead, 20 Wounded...

[Cow Poke]

In Australia, the government simply did a compulsory buy-back on the types of gun they objected to, and then scraped them:

Australia has kangaroos. We don't except in captivity.

[lilpixieofterror]

Australia has kangaroos. We don't except in captivity.

Not only that, but there's plenty of pictures of piles of drugs being found and destroyed by law enforcement too. Does that therefore mean drugs are rare and hard to come by? The military destroys old weapons, like that too, pictures, without any sort of context behind them, are pretty much worthless.

[Rational Gaze]

One more thing, Sweden (31.6), Norway (31.3), France (31.2), Canada (30.8), Austria (30.4), Iceland (30.3), Germany (30.3), Finland (29.1), and New Zealand (22.4) have substantially higher gun ownership (per 100 citizens) rates than Australia (15), the UK (6.6), and Japan (0.6).

Yet the difference in murder rates (per 100,000 citizens) are as follows:

Sweden (0.7)
Norway (2.2)
France (1.0)
Canada (1.6)
Austria (0.9)
Iceland (0.3)
Germany (0.8)
Finland (1.6)
New Zealand (0.9)
Australia (1.1)
UK (1.0)
Japan (0.3)

Oddly enough, Switzerland has 45.7 guns per 100 citizens and has a murder rate of 0.6 per 100,000 citizens. Of course, in Switzerland, a significant number of civilians have government-owned military guns in their possession, and these are not included in these statistics.

[Rational Gaze]

I just keep Gazing at this, because that's WAY too Rational!

Sometimes, I amaze even myself.

[lilpixieofterror]

Sometimes, I amaze even myself.

And so humble too.

[Sam]

Which is self-evidently false to anybody with more than half a brain. There is no correlation.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]10292[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]10293[/ATTACH]

Or you actually address the study referenced and cited, which finds a strong correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates ...



This is where you left the conversation the last time, if I remember; you conflated a whole slew of unlike countries in your comparisons, though we agreed that gun ownership was not the sole or even primary cause of intentional deaths across the world at any given time. When comparing like to like, however, we do find that gun ownership is a strong contributor to intentional deaths. If you're not filtering out countries like Honduras or Sudan from your graphs, there, you're just contributing to the noise level. The USA should be compared to similarly industrialized, developed nations. And when we do that, the correlation is abundantly clear.

[Sam]

One more thing, Sweden (31.6), Norway (31.3), France (31.2), Canada (30.8), Austria (30.4), Iceland (30.3), Germany (30.3), Finland (29.1), and New Zealand (22.4) have substantially higher gun ownership (per 100 citizens) rates than Australia (15), the UK (6.6), and Japan (0.6).

Yet the difference in murder rates (per 100,000 citizens) are as follows:

Sweden (0.7)
Norway (2.2)
France (1.0)
Canada (1.6)
Austria (0.9)
Iceland (0.3)
Germany (0.8)
Finland (1.6)
New Zealand (0.9)
Australia (1.1)
UK (1.0)
Japan (0.3)

Oddly enough, Switzerland has 45.7 guns per 100 citizens and has a murder rate of 0.6 per 100,000 citizens. Of course, in Switzerland, a significant number of civilians have government-owned military guns in their possession, and these are not included in these statistics.

We also discussed this Norway statistic last time, I think. That's an abnormally high homicide rate for Norway because that year included the terrorist attack. As Wikipedia notes:

Source: List of countries by intentional homicide rate. Wikipedia. Accessed 2015.10.02

If one discounts the single anomalous terrorist attack of 2011, the homicide rate in Norway falls to 0.6

© Copyright Original Source

So discounting Norway's abnormally high rate, the USA's murder rates are at least three times higher than any country on that list.

[Starlight]

Which is self-evidently false to anybody with more than half a brain. There is no correlation.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]10292[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]10293[/ATTACH]

RG, I know it's probably asking far too much for your posts to make sense... but if you're going to post graphs, can you make sure that 1) The axes are labelled, and 2) It is clear what the data points represent, and 3) It is clear what source is being used for the data. Otherwise the graphs are completely meaningless, incomprehensible, and add nothing to the discussion.

[Starlight]

A lot of these other countries have significantly smaller populations, and populations that are considerably less diverse and more homogenous than the US.

I'm getting tired of seeing this ridiculous talking point on these boards. US conservatives seem to imagine that the US is some sort of massively multicultural melting pot whereas other countries are racially pure or something. It's just not true.

A Harvard study produced this map of ethnic diversity in the world:


As you can see (or perhaps can't because the color fades into the background), New Zealand (off the south-east coast of Australia, for the geographically challenged) is the same color as the US. And Canada is more ethnically diverse than either one, as are Belgium and Switzerland in Europe (not to mention most of South America, most of southern Asia, and nearly all of Africa). America is not some sort of huge outlier in ethnic diversity, and in fact compared to the countries with which it shares a common origin (ie Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - all colonized by the British) it is very average in its level of multiculturalism.

Eight children were murdered last year in a mass-stabbing in Australia:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...Australia.html

Then there's the handful of mass stabbings in China a few years ago that left 25 dead. These are just the ones I know from memory. There have been many more than this.

There have been a few mass stabbings worldwide in the last decade that have made headlines. Whereas mass shootings in the US alone this year are currently at 297 instances.

[CMD]

In the US, homicide rates have been declining for years as firearm sales and ownership has been increasing. If there is such a "strong correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates," shouldn't homicide rates be rising rather than falling?

[Cow Poke]

A Harvard study produced this map of ethnic diversity in the world:

So, the US is in the middle, and Australia is much darker (whatever color that is)

[rogue06]

Australia has kangaroos. We don't except in captivity.

[Cow Poke]

Oddly enough, Switzerland has 45.7 guns per 100 citizens and has a murder rate of 0.6 per 100,000 citizens. Of course, in Switzerland, a significant number of civilians have government-owned military guns in their possession, and these are not included in these statistics.

Well, they're not gunophobes - they grow up understanding what guns are and how to handle them safely.

[Cow Poke]

Buyback programs have proven to well intentioned wastes of money.

But they make liberals FEEL good!

[Sam]

In the US, homicide rates have been declining for years as firearm sales and ownership has been increasing. If there is such a "strong correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates," shouldn't homicide rates be rising rather than falling?

Can you be more specific? When we look at gun ownership over decades in the US, we see a downward trend:

18fivethirtyeight-guns2-blog480.jpg

Any road, a strong correlation doesn't mean a 1:1 correlation. The USA has an abnormally high rate of gun ownership; it's entirely possible that there's a level of diminishing returns where even higher gun ownership doesn't correlate to even higher homicides and gun ownership has to come down very significantly in order to reduce the contribution of gun ownership to firearm-related deaths. The fact of the matter remains that there is a strong correlation between gun ownership and firearm-related homicides even when the USA is excluded from the study cited above.