The Guardian:
"No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.
The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people. Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.
There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual gun violence: mental illness, for example. Jonathan Metzl, a mental health expert at Vanderbilt University, told me that this is just not the case. People with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And while it's true that an extraordinary amount of mass shooters (up to 60 percent) have some kind of psychiatric or psychological symptoms, Metzl points out that other factors are much better predictors of gun violence: substance abuse, poverty, history of violence, and, yes, access to guns.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. And multiple simulations have demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths."
You can read the rest of this article and view a very interesting video showing, in a simulation, that people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they're shot. Link: http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america
Let's just agree to disagree. As far as I'm concerned, every child who is killed at the hands of another child, every woman shot by an abusive partner, every colleague gunned down by a revengeful employee--all or nearly all could have been prevented.