The deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary is provoking another
heated round of the same conversation that the U.S. has after every mass
shooting: is there something particular or unusual to our gun culture?
The answer, based on this
comparative data from the international Small Arms Survey, is that yes, American gun ownership rates are positively unparalleled.
These three charts show America's gun ownership as compared to the
rest of the world. In every chart, the U.S. is colored red so that it's
easy to spot. It's also, you'll notice, by far the highest number on
every chart. This first chart shows the rate of privately owned guns per
capita in every nation in the world, ranked from least to most.
Click to enlarge. Data source: Small Arms Survey (Max Fisher/Washington Post)
Americans don't just have more guns that anyone else – 270 million
privately held firearms. They also have the highest gun ownership per
capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every
10 Americans. The second highest gun ownership rate in the world is
Yemen; yes, Americans have nearly twice as many guns per person as do
Yemenis, who live in a conflict-torn Arab nation still dealing with
poverty, political unrest, a separatist Shia insurgency, an al-Qaeda
branch, and the aftereffects of a 1994 civil war.
This next chart just shows the gun ownership per capita rate for the
"developed" countries, or the members of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). That basically means the world's
rich countries. Some of them, such as Switzerland and Finland, are
actually among the highest-ranking countries in the world by gun
ownership rates. But the U.S. is still way, way ahead. Keep this chart
in mind the next time someone compares U.S. gun ownership to Switzerland
or to Israel.
Israel has only 7.3 privately owned guns for every 100 people, which
means that the American rate is 12 times as large. For comparison's
sake, Israel's gun ownership rate is about 12 times that of Japan. That
means that the difference between America and Israel, in terms of gun
ownership per capita, is about the same as the difference between Israel
and Japan,
which has perhaps the strictest gun control regime in the world.
Click to enlarge. Data source: Small Arms Survey (Max Fisher/Washington Post)
This chart next shows the 10 countries with the highest per capita
gun ownership rates in the world. It's a pretty motley bunch. Recent war
zones such as Yemen, Serbia, and Iraq are on there, but so are
relatively developed (and peaceful) Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden.
The fact that Swiss gun murder rates are much lower than Iraq's are a
reminder that, yes, there is a lot more to determining a national rate
of gun-related homicides than just firearm ownership. Still,
as we saw in a previous post,
Switzerland also has an unusually high rate of gun-related murders.
It's not as high as America's, but then again neither is their gun
ownership rate.
Click to enlarge. Data source: Small Arms Survey (Max Fisher/Washington Post)
This last chart, just for kicks, shows the total number of privately
owned guns for every country in the world. It's not a perfect comparison
because the U.S. is, of course, the third most populous nation on
Earth. But it is worth noting this one effect of America's unusually
liberal gun laws, which contribute to its sky-high private ownership
rate: there are a
lot of guns in America. There are 270 million
guns owned by American citizens, according to the survey data. The
second-ranking country, India, a country over three times our
population, has 46 million. And, as you can see from the data, the vast
majority of the world's countries have fewer 10 million guns held by its
citizens.
Click to enlarge. Data source: Small Arms Survey (Max Fisher/Washington Post)
America's gun-related murder rate is the highest in the developed
world, excluding Mexico, where the ongoing drug war pushes the murder
stats way up. The question of what causes the U.S. firearm-related
homicide rate is a complicated one involving many variables, but it
certainly seems plausible, especially the day after a
knife attack in China
injured 22 children but killed none, that one of those variables would be access to firearms. And, in this regard, America is truly exceptional.
Max Fisher
is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in
security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his
daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on
Twitter or
Facebook.
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My son sent this to me to look at. A few years ago he and his wife were attending on of the State univeristies here in California and took a walk in nearby foothills and were shot at several times by several youths for no apparent reason. Luckily they were not hit and were far away enough not to be injured or killed and simply hid behind some rocks until the shooting stopped. However later, his wife had psychological issues and had to drop out of school for one quarter because of a PTSD kind of experience from this. He also found it difficult to study after this but persevered through the quarter anyway. So, he sent me this to tell me that Americans have too man guns. ( believe it is now about 90 weapons for every 100 people in the U.S. which is the highest ratio of guns to people in the world.
Though both got their B.S. degrees now in nursing it was a difficult experience for them both at the time while in college then.
Maybe one reason America tends to win wars is that most of the young men already knew how to shoot well before they went to the Army or to war always?
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