Would you be satisfied if our rates were more comparable to Western Europe? If you took blacks out of the equation, our homicide rates would be on par with Germany and lower than France. And we own WAY more guns than they do. (there are 350,000,000 guns in the US).
Homicide Offender Rate/100,000 by Race in US:
3.4 – White
25.8 – Black
3.2 – Other
What about just violence in general?
Assaults
Definition: 'Assault' means physical attack against the body of another person resulting in serious bodily injury; excluding indecent/sexual assault; threats and slapping/punching. 'Assault' leading to death should also be excluded.
Rate/100,000 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
USA 294.9 288.2 290.5 291.8 286.4 276.1 262.2
England/Wales 862.8 967.3 1,013.7 939.4 832.9 769.9 729.8
Scotland 1,232.5 1,584.9 1,542.8 1,655.1 1,545.9 1,545.7 1,487.2
Now homicides, yes, we are 4x higher than England (1.2 England v. 5 for US). But you are talking a couple of points per hundred thousand people. Compare that to physical assault resulting in serious bodily injury: 262 for US v. 730 for England or 1,487 for Scotland!
So you think 5 v. 1.2 is horrible for the US, but you are okay with Great Britain having 500-1,200 more violent assaults for the same group?
The difference in our homicide rates is less than 4 (per 100,000).
The difference in our violent assault rates is 1,225 (per 100,000).
4, bad; 1,225 good?
Gun control advocates are always cherry picking stats. They have to because their arguments are nonsensical and based on a ridiculous set of presuppositions. If we walled off a few two square mile plots in several American cities our homicide rate would be practically nothing after the inhabitants killed each other off. The rest of us are very well behaved, thank you very much.
(I pulled these numbers a couple of years ago for something I wrote, and they do change slightly from year to year, but the overall trends are identical).
Mr. freediver, you weren't really afraid of the gun owner at Subway, were you? If you were truly afraid you would have left.