On an average day in 2017 in the United States, 47 people were murdered. About 2/3 of them were killed by firearms.
On an average day in 2017 in Western Europe--an area whose population is greater than that of the U.S.--11 people were murdered. Most of them were not killed by firearms.
The United States homicide rate (number of people killed for every 100,000 residents) is nearly 5 1/2 times greater than the Western European homicide rate.
You're 10 times more likely to be murdered in the U.S. than in Norway.
If, as some argue, the problem is not access to guns but rather violent mental illness or just plain badness, are we Americans really 10 times sicker than Norwegians?
Maybe. Every one of the Western European countries has better access to health care than the United States. Every one of them pays a lot less for it, too. (But save us from socialism, right?)
Though maybe America's flood of firearms does have something to do with our homicide rate. Every one of the Western European countries regulates gun ownership more strictly than does the U.S. (But golly, we need a well-regulated militia, right?)
I don't know if Americans are more than 5 times more deranged than Western Europeans. It's easy to think, though, that we're more than 5 times more ignorant. There are proven ways to save a lot of American lives. We could study how other countries reduce violence. Our corrupt leaders, however, don't want us to do that. After all, there's a lot of money to be made in guns and overpriced healthcare.
P.S. I wrote this several days before the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Here's a link to what I posted the day after those horrific events.In case you'd like to see how the U.S. homicide rate compares with the homicide rates of 17 European countries, I made this chart.
All data is from 2017. Follow these links if you want to check the figures on homicides,
European population, and U.S. population.
3 comments:
Yikes, I knew we were out of control re. guns but the statistics are so bald, LaVonne! I think our homicide rate was far lower before people had access to assault weapons. We could ban these again--we did it once before.
Oh, and I hope you and David are holding your heads up after Trump's recent assault on your city. Sigh.
Those are stunning numbers. The NRA often cites Switzerland as a country with high per capita gun ownership and a low homicide rate. The U.S. could do worse than to study the Swiss approach to gun control, which includes strict vetting of gun owners.
Nothing will change until we change this current corrupted administration and the corrupt legislators that are dependent on the NRA. Studies by the CDC have indeed been approved, but the Republicans have repeatedly failed to fund the CDC study on gun violence. The hope is that if we can get a Democratic president from the current crop of candidates, AND replace enough senators, Obamacare can be expanded into some sort of decent healthcare for everyone in the United States.
Curtis Rogers
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