On 4/3/2015 6:00 PM, LizR wrote:
On 3 April 2015 at 04:13, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com
<mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com>> wrote:
Switzerland is a special case. Their army is structured in a weird way. All
men up
to a certain age are technically in the army and are actually obliged to
have a
weapon and keep it in their home. We are talking about assault rifles
(there are
about half a million of them in Swiss household) as well as regular
pistols. So this
might mess up the statistics, because they might not be counted as weapons
owned by
a civilian household, even though they are available as such. On the other
hand,
this also means that all of these gun owners receive military training on
how to
handle the weapons.
Oh, so Brent was just trolling. I guess that's nothing new.
Why does it make a difference that the guns are not owned by the citizens. The citizen
possess the gun and can use it at any time. It is a fully automatic weapon (which is very
restricted in the US). That the owners receive training in how to use the weapons might
reduce accidents, but it can't be the difference in intentional homicides.
So I think Switzerland is an excellent counter example to the proposition that it is the
widespread availability of guns in the US that is responsible for the high gun death
rate. The Swiss have more widespread availability of guns that are more capable of
killing a lot of people killing than those available in the US. The obvious conclusion is
that there is some other very important factor.
If you look at the rates of homicide in different nations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
The first thing you notice is that virtually the top spots are filled by western
hemisphere nations. The exceptions are Swaziland which is #5 and Canada which down with
Switzerland. They, at 0.5 (per year, per 100,000) are roughly twice that of New Zealand
at 0.26 which is twice Australia's at 0.11. I think the availability of guns in the US is
probably a major factor in the gun suicide rate in the US; even though the US is 19th in
intentional homicide rate, it's only 4th in suicide rate and 12th in accidental rate.
Brent
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