Statistics show laws limiting firearm ownership cause drop in deaths, injuries
America has a cultural identity with guns, from the colonist defending his liberty against the British to the cowboys of the Wild West to the modern grandma who stopped a home invader with her pistol. The right to own guns is so ingrained into the American persona that we enshrined it into the Bill of Rights.
This was at a time when a single-shot musket was the standard technology, before rifling was discovered, long before the machine gun made it possible for one man to fire as many bullets in a single minute as an entire Revolutionary War unit. It was a time when citizens had the same general weapons as soldiers attempting to infringe upon their rights, before the government had tanks and bombs and remote-controlled drones that could kill from a continent away.
There are some who would love nothing more than to see the Second Amendment abolished completely. However, that battle is all but over. The only fight left now is the limits on what kind of guns we allow. It's one thing to allow an average citizen to own a seven-shot pistol for self-defense and a wholly different one to allow someone to carry a 100-shot rifle for "hunting."
In 1994, Congress passed an assault weapon ban that severely limited the ability to own weapons with magazines that held more than 10 bullets. That law expired in 2004. There has been little willingness to challenge the National Rifle Association lobbyist hegemony since that time. The United States has been getting safer in every crime category, except for one. In the period between 2000 and 2009, violent crimes were down by 8 percent, aggravated assaults by 13 percent and murder rates down by 5 percent. Only assaults with guns rose — by nearly 20 percent — while the number of murders with guns has remained the same.
The United Nations releases a Small Arms Survey annually. In 2007 — shortly before the myth of Obama's anti-gun stance drove up sales — the survey ranked the United States as the top owner of firearms, with nearly 88 out of every 100 citizens owning a gun.
The next highest on the list is Yemen, with 54 guns per 100 citizens.
The United States has over 270 million firearms owned by the civilian population. Five percent of the world's population owns over half its guns.
Gun restrictions work. A simple check of the statistics shows that states with even the barest restrictions on gun ownership (like Hawaii and New York) have lower gun homicide rates than those without such laws (like Arizona and Louisiana).
The numbers suggest two possibilities: Either the overwhelming infiltration of guns into American society has caused a higher number of per-capita gun deaths than any non-conflict region in the world, or Americans are inherently more bloodthirsty than the rest of the world. It should be obvious which one would be less troubling to fix.
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