this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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notice how in the graph on wikipedia, excluding USA, the correlation is really not that strong.
dont get me wrong, i agree with the general sentiment, but bad data weakens even the best of cases.
image
I get the point the comic is trying to make, but saying that more guns means more people die from guns isn't really a "gotcha"... In places with fewer guns, fewer people are using guns to do their murderings.
I'd be more interested in a graph that shows total murders per capita compared to gun ownership per capita.
Before I get dog-piled, I'd like to add that I know that there are too many guns in the US, and the process to buy a firearm is surprisingly lax. I do think there is a relationship between gun ownership and the murder rates, and the fact that most school shootings don't even make the news anymore (and if they do, it's for less than a day) indicates that the frogs have been completely boiled at this point.
Fair point but see below...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
The United States has over 4 times more murders per capita than France, for instance.
And you really shouldn't discount just how easy it is to kill someone with a gun. I don't have the stats at hand right now but knife related killings (as an example) are way less likely to happen because victims have a comparatively good chance to survive a knife attack.
There are solid reasons for keeping weapons that are designed to kill human beings out of the hands of most of us.
One thing a lot of people seem to forget is that the US has significantly more income inequality and significantly less social safety nets than France. Poverty drives crime.
What the US needs most is nationalized healthcare, deregulation of marijuana to cut down on mass incarceration (which breaks up families and drives poverty), actually taxing the rich, and better regulations and workers rights to prevent corporations from exploiting everyone
Yes, but also an easy access to guns enables crimes by itself, and makes existing crimes deadly. That happens on top of other social problems.
A random poor teen with nothing to lose might think about robing a store, but be too scared of being confronted and never actually do it, unless he gets a gun which gives him courage. If a random night robbers get confronted with surprised home owner, they might punch him, scream, and run away, unless they have a gun in which case they're in a shootout and everyone is dead.
That becomes moot if they aren't motivated to commit crimes in the first place.
Even if removing guns from the US reduced crime rates, it wouldn't be as much as doing what I described. Plus, there's an opportunity cost, in that you only have so much political capital to spend on legislation.
How about we focus on improving the lives of 99% of the population instead of wasting political capital on trying to reclassify 50% of the population as criminals for owning guns.
Until we actually create post-scarcity luxury gay space communism, there is always someone who is at least somehow motivated to do some crimes. And when there are easy murdermachines lying around, that motivation just gets married with opportunity.
Your loaded language betrays your deep gun-related motivation so I don't think you will actually hear me, but I will try to convey this anyway. Improving the lives of 99% of the population necessarily will have to include strict gun control, it is impossible without it, and it's one of the prerequisites. Not the first one, not even top 5 maybe, but it's up there.
Well done. No notes.
Also, if everyone's out there getting shot, then of course I need a gun to protect myself.
A gun doesn't stop you from getting shot, it just gives you a chance to shoot back.
Yes, I know you were being sarcastic.
Having a gun probably also gives you a better chance of being shot either by suicide, accident, or making yourself seem like more of a threat.
And giving you false confidence making you do more stupid choices that lead you to danger that you otherwise would never get yourself into
That largely depends on if you're their intended target.
But anyone fetishizing being the "good guy with a gun" would just piss their pants.
If I was carrying and there was an active shooter, I sure as hell would run or hide before fighting.
You don't know who the active shooter actually is. Maybe the guy you saw with a gun is a plainclothes or off duty cop who is responding to the actual active shooter. Maybe there is more than one shooter, and confronting the one you see makes you a target for the one you don't. Maybe the cops find you after shooting the active shooter, and assume you are the perpetrator.
For clarification, I don't carry a gun, I just used myself as an example to simplify the text.
If anyone has an darned good self defense training, especially with firearms, they should be doing what you say exactly. You hide or GTFO dodge if there's an active shooter. You're not going to be a hero and just as likely to end up shot. Especially if they're using a long arm over your compact carry.
You nail the second part as well, the fog of war situation. I've had this argument in real life and it took a bit for the person to understand you can't ID the shooter if everyone with a gun tries to converge on them.
Gun ownership isn't a right, it's a privilege that carries heavy responsibilities. It's a cultural view of firearms that differs heavily. I'm more likely to trust a leftist who trains, doesn't exclaim everywhere they own a firearm, and locks up what needs to be locked up. The entire home invasion thing is a myth, majority that end up in a home with someone there bail. Few try to fight because they don't know what you might have.
And the gun manufacturers are literally making a killing.
another way these facts get skewed: most gun deaths are suicides, not homicides
in the US, states with the strictest gun laws do also have the lowest suicide rates, maybe because when there isn't an easy way to quickly exit, fewer people do - and the same reasoning probably applies to homicides
either way, there are also accidental gun deaths (kids accidentally shooting themselves or others because they're playing with daddy's gun, etc.) - so gun policies absolutely do save or cost lives
Intentional heroin overdose
Most suicides are spur of the moment things in execution. So the more steps it takes to complete suicide the more chances for reflection and regret and the less likely it gets carried out.
Compare the steps required from gun and overdose.
Gun: decide on firearm, retrieve from storage, load, shoot.
Drugs- decide on the drug of choice, find a source of the drug, purchase enough to complete suicide (tricky to judge with many drugs and expensive with things like heroin), often purchase alcohol as well, prepare drugs (if tablets pop them out of the packets or prepare the heroin), take drugs (if taking tablets probably going to be swallowing tablets for a good while).
In the UK we limit the amount of drugs you can buy at one time (like paracetamol, a common overdose choice) as the extra step of having to visit multiple shops or come back repeatedly reduces suicide rates.
Particularly when a family member already owns a gun, or you personally already own a gun.
I had guns for personal safety reasons, so suicide was always a single step away for me. (Which was quite dangerous because I incidentally owned guns when I was very suicidal, lol.)
Also, for whatever reason, men have a much higher suicide rate and are much more likely to use a gun - they care a lot less about the mess they leave behind. Women on the other hand are much more likely to not end up killing themselves, and much more likely to use a method with less trauma and cleanup, like poisoning themselves.
These might also be contributing factors for why the stats show far more people kill themselves with guns than by poisoning.
Also, poisoning is a very risky form of suicide, high chance it will fail - you either don't take enough and then survive the poisoning (maybe you vomit up the drugs while you're unconscious, maybe a family member finds you and rushes you to the ER where they pump your stomach, etc.) - and often surviving a poisoning can leave you disabled, etc. You can survive a suicide attempt with a gun, I just think it's less common if executed correctly.
Gets even more interesting when looking at kills by police.
Like Lee Camp did recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxoOAArudgI
Because it's not a gradual response curve. It doesn't really matter is it 10 guns per 100 people, or 15, if there is a strict gun control policy, and you can't easily get a gun at the age of 18 in a fishing shop. The problem is ubiquity that comes when the society is saturated and there is very little regulations.
yeah I think the real world is more complicated. Like, its not just about numbers, but also how control is implemented and even culture.
But it's also about numbers, it's just not a curve more of a ladder. You can't saturate the society with guns and expect that they will not be a problem because your culture is good and control is implemented. Switzerland just about did it, but there is so many caveats it doesn't even count, and let's admit it, nobody else is Switzerland, so that's an enormous outlier.
I mean, yeah, having good control and a sane culture around it, you couldn't reach USA's sheer number if you tried.
You know it's illegal to study gun violence in America, correct?
That is absolutely fucked up, but whats the relevance?
The data are inaccurate
oh, well, luckily its not illegal for researchers in the rest of the world to study gun violence in America.
True enough, but good luck getting the data.