Your basic premise was having more guns makes people safer. You also cited Great Britain and Canada where there is no 2nd Amendementso there's no point in bringing it up when I cite the same countries. I only used two countries (U.S. and Canada) with a vastly different rate of gun ownership to show statistics on the comparative rate of crime connected to guns shows you are dead wrong since the rate is 7 times higher in the U.S. where your theory says the U.S. rate should be lower. Your view on that point, which all I referred to is wrong. That's all nothing more. But you want to discount the evidence with a bad excuse. Okay Wilbur, I see if you don't like the facts your tactic is simply to discount them.
According to you 15% of Canadian households have guns. According to Brietbart and other sources 35% to 40% of American households have guns yet gun related crime rates per 100,000 between the U.S. and Canada is 7 times higher in the U.S. despite about 2 1/2 times the protection in the U.S.. You view does not hold water based on this.
Probably all of you who are worried about anyone taking away your gun or restricting buying them base your views on the idea that having a gun means you WILL successfully defend yourself. I've got a gun and I'm John Wayne, Rambo, Sergeant York. It's a presumptuous view when nerves, fear, and danger enter into any real criminal situation.
The statistic I'd like to see is the success rate of an armed intruder versus a home owner, store clerk, singles out on the town, families on an outing, women alone with guns, and whether they used them effectively. Unfortunately, those stats are loaded with false alarms like a home owner grabbing a gun and discovering a raccoon has knocked over the garbage....again, or any number of gun owners misreading a situation. Then there are those owners who pull out a gun no matter who comes to the door, and sometimes shoot lost persons just seeking help. Unfortunately, it seems any time anyone who pulls out a gun when they think there's trouble gets added to some very distorted statistics.
The problem is there's too much at stake for lobbyists on either side to be honest and risk losing the argument.
Cheers,
Merlot
First of all, I never said that having more guns makes people safer. What I am saying is that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens (in Canada, that means a person who has qualified to have a firearms license and continues to have no criminal record) is a knee jerk reaction to the actions of criminals, and does not necessarily make a society safer.
Thos statistics you mention also don't mention that most gun crime in the US is using handguns, and are the result of inner city gang gun culture and crime.
What I also say is that, in a society (just about every society) where it is impossible to prevent criminals to have access to guns, there is a certain level of gun ownership that is a deterrence to certain types of crime. That threshold is in the order of 10% of households who store a gun at home. More than that, and criminals will tend to not enter a home with people in it, for fear of encountering a victim capable of defending themselves with lethal force. Less than that, and there is more of a chance that a criminal will not worry about confronting an armed resident. That is not to conflate that EVERY household should have a gun. Indeed, many people doen't want them and that's their right. Also, it's not everybody who wants to take the trouble of taking the firearms course and getting a license, nor take the responsiblity to stay proficient in their use.
There is not necessarily a correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide between Western countries. Gun homicide is a function of the violence of society itself, and not the incident number of guns.
Germany, Sweden, Norway and France have 30% more gun ownership per capita than Canada, but have less gun homicides per capita:
Germany: 14% of Canadian gun homicides
Norway: 20% of Canadian gun homicides
Sweden: 38% of Canadian gun homicides
France: 40% of Canadian gun homicides
Incidentally, there are as many handguns in Norway than rifles. But the rates of homicide are low, even though the majority of gun crimes are committed with handguns, not rifles.
In Switzerland, there are almost twice as many guns in private hands per capita than Canada (92% more), but the gun homicide rate is less than half (46%).
On the other hand, Jamaica has a very low level of private gun ownership per capita, comparable to the UK: 8.1 guns per person, or one third of Canada's rate. Yet, the rate of homicide by gun is almost 14 TIMES the US rate, and 78 TIMES that of Canada.
The rate of firearms homicide is largely an indication of how violent a society is, and is not directly related to the possession of guns. Banning guns does not solve the problem of gun violence, because the perpetrators are criminals who don't obey the law and surrender their guns when told to do so. Gun violence in the US is a reflection of its violent society, and not related directly to the number of guns in law-abiding circulation.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/c...arm_possession/194,192,177,178,69,66,31,10,90
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/136/rate_of_gun_homicide/194,192,178,177,69,66,31,10,90