Gun Lies

Much of the political thinking about violence in the United States comes from unfavorable comparisons between the United States and a series of cherry-picked countries with lower murder rates and with fewer guns per capita. We’ve all seen it many times. The United States, with a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 is compared to a variety of Western and Central European countries (also sometimes Japan) with murder rates often below 1 per 100,000. This is, in turn, supposed to fill Americans with a sense of shame and illustrate that the United States should be regarded as some sort of pariah nation because of its murder rate.

Note, however, that these comparisons always employ a carefully selected list of countries, most of which are very unlike the United States. They are  countries that were settled long ago by the dominant ethnic group, they are ethnically non-diverse today, they are frequently very small countries (such as Norway, with a population of 5 million) with very locally based democracies (again, unlike the US with an immense population and far fewer representatives in government per voter). Politically, historically, and demographically, the US has little in common with Europe or Japan.

European countries share very few of these qualities in common with the US.

So, it would seem that the old diktat of “thou shalt only compare US murder rates to the approved ‘developed’ countries” is based on really no objective standard at all. And we should stop doing it.

If we’re honestly trying to evaluate the nature of crime and violence in a comparative atmosphere, we cannot limit ourselves to a handful of countries that have very little in common with the US beyond a handful of economic indicators.

A Note on the Data: 

Gun ownership levels are based on the Small Arms Survey data. This takes into account “registered” vs. “unregistered” civilian gun ownership in the countries surveyed.  Murder rates come from UNODC data.

State by state data in the US is usually presented as a percentage of residents who are gun owners. worldwide, however, gun ownership is presented as numbers of guns per 100 residents. I attempted to make the two lists compatible by taking the percentage of gun owners and adjusting it to reflect the fact that there are about 2.8 guns per gun owner in the US (using Small Arms Survey Data for the US). Thus, in Wyoming, for example, we end up with a number of more than 130 guns per 100 residents.

Now, let’s address the bait-and-switch of using “gun-related killings” versus homicides, that is often used. These numbers include accidents and suicides. But of course, the reason most people are concerned about gun violence is because of homicides. Many people commit suicides with ropes and cars, but we don’t talk about banning ropes and cars. Moreover, many people die from accidents involving power tools, ladders, and other items. Again, we don’t talk about banning those things. The other statistic often used is “gun-related deaths.” This also ignores the fact that the whole point of gun control (in the minds of most of the public) is to bring down the murder rate. It would be irresponsible to bring down gun murders and then ignore the overall murder rate.  After all, if the “gun murder” rate goes down, but the murder rate remains unchanged, then we find that little has been accomplished. It stands to reason that few murdered people think in their last moments “gee, at least I wasn’t murdered with a gun.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.