Here’s some food for thought: There are more than 393 millions firearms in the United States.
Americans have been buying in excess of one million guns per month for the last four-plus years.
Our nation also leads the world, by far, in number of firearms owned per 100 civilians.
Yet the United States is not in the top 50 countries in murder rate — and may be outside the top 100.
What’s more, though gun ownership has been increasing markedly, big American cities experienced a significant decline in shootings in 2023, with the murder and shooting rates dropping below pre-pandemic levels. This is despite the fact that crime has risen in general.
So is the United States really the Wild West of murder and mayhem anti-Second Amendment advocates claim? And is there really any correlation between strictness of gun-control laws, or firearm ownership rates, and murder rates?
Writing last week, firearms instructor and retired police officer Mike McDaniel answers in the negative — and paints a positive picture.
Citing a video from commentator Bill Whittle titled “Number One With A Bullet,” McDaniel writes that “America is not first, tenth, not even fiftieth in the world in per capita homicides, but one hundred eleventh.” The video is eight years old, McDaniel points out, so the stats may now be different. Yet no source places the United States among “the most violent countries.”
For example, this 2017 list from the United Nations has the United States in 55th place, the World Population Review places us at 76, and index mundi says 64. Moreover, 2023’s major decline in murder and shootings may mean that we’re today lower still.
Yet more must be said. “Eliminating statistics from our most murderous, d/S/C [Democrat] ruled cities,” McDaniel also informs, “if we had the same per capita murder rate as Plano, Texas — .4 per 100,000 — which Whittle affirms [is] one of the best armed cities in America, we’d be not one hundred eleventh in the world, but two hundred eleventh in the world.”
So what are the most dangerous countries, actually? McDaniel provides this list:
- Honduras
- Venezuela
- United States Virgin Islands
- Belize
- El Salvador
- Guatemala
- Jamaica
- Lesotho
- Swaziland
- Saint Kitts and Nevis
The above varies somewhat depending on the source and year, but, mainly, what changes are not the countries, but their order.
Yet something that doesn’t change, writes McDaniel, is “that all of these countries/territories are either socialist, strictly gun controlling, or both.”
But what about mass shootings? Aren’t they uniquely “American”? Well, try this on for size:
“Over the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, the US had less than 1.13% of the world’s share of mass public shooters and 1.77% of its mass public shooting murders,” McDaniel states. “That’s much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population.”
“This holds true for school attacks as well, which remain thankfully rare,” he adds.
In reality, there’s no correlation between gun-control-law strictness and murder rate. Just consider some more little-known facts:
The explanation? Demographics. As Sowell puts it, it’s not the guns that explain the different murder rates. It’s the people.
With regard to surviving murder attempts, however, guns do make a difference. In fact, “Every study done since the Clinton Administration reveals Americans successfully, defensively use guns, usually without firing a shot, from 500,000 to 2.5 million times each year,” McDaniel also tells us. “Many of these studies were done by government, particularly the CDC, before Congress, in 1996, prevented it from spending money on anti-liberty/gun ‘research.’ The Clinton Administration tried a study, confident it would provide more ammunition for gun bans, and found 1.5 million defensive gun uses per year. They tried to bury the study, but it leaked.”
Related to this, too, do note, a 2018 study that cited the FBI found that armed citizens are successful at thwarting active shooters 94 percent of the time.
And this is for sure: When anarchy reigns — as during the L.A. riots or in Hurricane Katrina’s wake — and the police are nowhere to be found, without a gun you’re easy prey 100 percent of the time.