Another kind of "apples to oranges" comparison is raw numbersKBCraig wrote:My paraphrase of a Wikipedia article (see the original for cites):Smokewagon wrote:I would also question the 30,000 gun crime deaths per year. Thats like 80 something per day. I don't buy it.
According to the FBI, firearms used to commit 68% of the 14,860 homicides in the U.S. in 2005. That's just over 10,100 gun homicides for that year.
The CDC estimates there were 52,447 violence-related and 23,237 accidental gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000. The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, with firearms used in 16,907 suicides in the United States during 2004.
There are approximately 800-900 accidental gun deaths per year. If the suicide figures for 2004 and homicide figures for 2005 were steady, that would mean approximately 28,000 gunshot deaths from all causes: suicide, murder, negligent homicide, justifiable homicide, and accident.
There's also a good reference here, although it doesn't include western Europe (probably because of difference in reporting methods):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence
rather than per capita. It seems to me that it is only meaningful
to compare per capita numbers, which indicate the degree to which
laws affect action. Raw numbers for a certain act may be double
in one context than another and yet be far rarer per capita in
the first context than the other due to population differences.