As we prepare for another round of expanding government power yet more in the name of emotion-based calls for gun control, let's set out some facts easily available for the world to consider and verify:
-- In terms of rates of gun ownership, the United States tops all other nations in the world with 112 guns per 100 people. That's about 1.1 guns per person in the U.S. This dwarfs most other countries, and the second runner up, Serbia, is all the way down to 69 guns per 100 people.
-- In terms of rates of homicide, the United States is nowhere close to the top, a spot proudly occupied by Honduras, which has over 90 murders per year per 100,000 people. In fact, as one surveys the countries with the highest rates of murder in the world, one finds a number of commonalities: Most are communist or socialist regimes in which there is little personal freedom, personal property is little protected by law, and guns as well as everything else are regulated heavily by government bureaucrats. Of 218 sovereign nations and regions ranked by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United States came in at #121 with an annual murder rate of 3.8 per 100,000 people.
-- The United States average murder rate per 100,000 of 3.8 includes Democratically controlled American cities that have the strictest guns laws and, not surprisingly, many of the highest crime rates. These cities include bastions of Democratic government like Saint Louis, which has an annual murder rate of 50 per 100,000 people, and Detroit, which comes in at 45 murders per 100,000 people, and New Orleans, Baltimore, and Newark, all of which give us about 35 murders per year per 100,000, respectively.
Thus, if those Democrat controlled cities with their strict gun regulations and high murder rates were excluded from the average, the U.S. murder rate per 100,000 people would be among the lowest in the world.
Use your reason, people. Use it well. Guns are scariest when you're attacked by a person who has one and you have no way to defend yourself or those around you. And it is the natural right of every human being to defend herself from an attack. And Congress and the President have zero Constitutional authority to regulate guns. Period.
Update: Glenn Reynolds writes,
Remember, when we’re talking about gun control, we’re not talking about how Obama told us us that ISIS was the JV team, or how he’s importing lots of poorly “vetted” middle eastern Muslims, or how he has botched Syria and Libya, or how his hashtag campaign against Boko Haram failed, or how the domestic protections against terror are looking porous and ineffectual, or how . . . well, you get the idea. Plus, gun control is a tribal rallying cry for uninformed Obama supporters. Or, to be less redundant, Obama supporters.
