The poster above is an 80s design classic, the stats are from 1985. The situation is much worse today - in 2011 the figure for gun-related fatalities in the US was 32,163, compared to 146 in the UK. In terms of deaths per capita - an individual in the USA is four times more likely to die in a gun-related incident than in the UK.
... AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK... having just asserted that there are four times as many gun-related deaths per capita in the US, I will attempt to prove a seemingly contradictory claim - that you are actually four times more likely to be killed by a gun in the UK than in the USA !!!
CONSIDER ...
There is, on average, one privately owned fire-arm per person living in the USA, while in the UK there is one gun for every 16 people - this means that every gun in the UK is four times more likely to kill someone than a gun located in the US.
Or to put it another way - in the USA guns are responsible for four times as many deaths, but in the UK you are four times more likely to be killed by A gun (ie- any gun in particular).
TA-DAH!
Okay, its a silly semantic trick, I know no-one is entertained. I can hear the wind whistling through the gravestones. I confess - I was just feeling pleased with myself for managing to work all that out from the statistics and I wanted to show off. Frankly, I was pleased with myself for being able to work out anything from statistics.
But why is each American firearm so much less likely to take a life? There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from this: AMERICANS CAN'T SHOOT FOR LOVE NOR MONEY! Bad choice of expression - love and money have got to be behind a fair few of those 32,163 lethal shootings in America in 2011.
I am left wondering .. if stricter gun laws were introduced in America, reducing gun ownership to an average of one in sixteen people, the same as the UK .. would the number of gun-related deaths per capita fall to the UK level ? Or would any one-particular-gun in America become 16 times more likely to shoot someone ?
The answer is probably somewhere inbetween.
The introduction of stricter gun legislation would seem to me to be a superficial measure, a mere band-aid - what America really needs is to legislate against love and money, the causes of gun crime ! After all ...
THE LOVE OF MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
I have no problem with ...
J
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