= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
rlpowell comments on Gun Control: How would we know? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (167)
Canada actually has fewer guns per capita. The US is definitely topping that list.
Someone has been feeding me lies!
I believed it as well until recently. I first remember hearing it in "Bowling For Columbine" so maybe Michael Moore is the culprit. American having more guns per capita definably fits better with my my background beliefs of those two countries.
Or did you?
I Ctrl-Fed through a few versions of the English subtitles available for Bowling for Columbine to try to find a claim that Canada has more guns per capita than the US. I turned up a blank (although subtitles don't capture everything, of course).
The most relevant bits I found were subtitles 1580 to 1583:
That implies about 23 guns per 100 Canadians, which is if anything an underestimate.
Whoops, I guess my memory was being confabulatory.
Yeah, I think I got that from there too.
A more interesting number for the gun control debate is the percentage of households with guns. That number in the U.S. has been declining -- pdf, but it is still very high in comparison with other developed nations.
However, exact comparisons of gun ownership rates internationally are tricky. The data is often sparse or non-uniform in the way it is collected. The most consistent comparisons I could find -- and I'd love to see more recent data -- were from the 1989 and 1992 International Crime Surveys. The numbers are reported in this paper on gun ownership, homicide, and suicide -- pdf. These data are old, but in 1989, about 48% of U.S. households had a firearm of some kind, compared with 29% of Canadian households. However, the numbers for handguns specifically were very different. In 1989, only 5% of Canadian households had a handgun, compared with 28% of U.S. households.
By a factor of three. Whereas the number of firearm-related deaths... [looks it up] I'm surprised. Turns out that the average gun in Canada kills more people than the average gun in the US, though most of that is suicides. The average gun in the US does kill more people other than its user than the average gun in Canada, but it's within a factor of two.
If you look at long guns alone, or actual gun owners(instead of guns owned), the numbers are closer. The US is still definitely in the lead, though.