The Absolutely Ridiculous Number of Guns in the United States
Graph of the Week #9
The figure above shows that the United States in 2018 had more than 120 guns for every 100 people, totaling almost 400 million guns. The United States is a considerable outlier in global context. Since 2018, Americans have bought about 55 million more guns, bringing the national armory to about 450 million guns. (Sources: Here and here).
The ubiquity of guns in the United States represent a failure of American society and indicative of deep policy failure. Much harm has resulted.
Defensive Gun Use
One unpublished CDC defensive gun use study implies that defensive gun use prevented around 2.5 million crimes. Most did not result in anyone being shot and most went unreported.
According to the study, guns were successfully used defensively 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.
Unpublished CDC Study Confirms More than 2 Million Defensive Handgun Uses Annually (lawenforcementtoday.com)
Here is more:
Why is the CDC Hiding Its Defensive Gun Use Statistics? - Capital Research Center
From the National Academies of Sciences (Medicine):
Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence |The National Academies Press
“Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010).”
Some states with strictest gun laws also have most dangerous cities | WJLA
Some fools say that is because neighboring states or cities have less restrictive gun laws, which simply allows their preconceived ideas to succeed in defiance of the facts. Law-abiding citizens will not go to a neighboring state to buy weapons, but criminals will.
Australia imposed strict gun laws in 1996, only to have homicides increase for four of the next six years.
I think you’ve been had, you are only looking at one aspect of gun use. Further, outlawing guns just makes things worse, the best examples are New York, Chicago and Baltimore.
This is an entirely non-scientific argument. The author gives no evidence for his statement other than comparing us to other countries. The number of guns in the country has no relation to anything important. In fact, the number of guns in Republican dominated districts has an inverse relationship to rising crime rates, as opposed to Democrat controlled districts. So what is his point? I have enormous respect for Dr Pielke because of his published work on climate change and on sports. But his well-written book on the place of science in the climate change debate should apply to this issue also. Yet he makes no connection other than the verbal equivalent of pearl clutching. He can do better. I hope he does.
The number of guns makes the US "an outlier". But we also have a Constitution that is more relevant to our polity, our politics and our daily political discourse than just about every other country. That also makes us "an outlier".
Why is the number of guns in any way a "failure" of our society or of our policies? He seems to think this is self-evident. But it is not; not to a country that has produced generations of citizens who have a profoundly deep understanding of what it means to have inalienable rights that were NOT given to us by our government but that belong to us by our very nature as human beings, and therefore cannot be taken from us by our government.
After spending 45 years in Canada, I can testify that Americans have a very much stronger sense of our inherent rights than any other people in the world.