after seeing this data, how can anyone think guns dont increase murder rate or that gun control doesn't curtail murder rate?

Yep.

But you might as well hit your head against a brick wall.

The Gun business is worth $50billion plus per annum.

And unless your name is Captain Kirk, you'll rapidly become a forgotten statistic.

Guns don't kill people, ammunition kills people, don't ban guns, ban bullets.

The 2nd amendment doesn't say anything about the right to bullets.

Safest country on Earth is Japan. All guns banned. It has about 50 times less rate of homicides than USA. But dont confuse USA with Japan. Japan is polytheist and atheist, but atheists in Japan arent insane Communists like atheists in USA. When you look at women in Japan and women in USA, the difference becomes very obvious. Same with men. Japanese people care about their looks, which is why you will rarely see fat Japanese woman or unshaved Japanese man with full beard. I keep telling you, it is related to self-care. You cant have society of fat and ugly people and expect it to work well.

Looks are everything in life. If you dont look good, all your achievements are reduced.

no one is saying people shouldn't have a gun for self defense, in general. we're just saying they should be discouraged by our policies given more people are harmed by the wide spread prevalence of guns than are benefited. but anyone who's a law abiding citizen and willing to play by the rules, and really wants one, can have one.

also, the per capita gun ownership rate has gone up in recent decades but that the number of people owning guns has gone down. while gun ownership has gone down, so has the murder rate.

### What the data show

* **More guns overall:**

The total number of civilian-owned firearms in the U.S. has grown steadily. Estimates put it at **over 400 million firearms today**, up from ~200 million in the mid-1990s.

* **Per capita increase:**

Because the U.S. population grew more slowly than gun sales, the **guns-per-person ratio has risen**. Current estimates suggest **1.2+ guns per person**.

* **Fewer households owning guns:**

Surveys (e.g., General Social Survey, Pew Research) show that the **percentage of households with a gun has declined** since the 1970s–80s.

* 1970s: ~50% of households reported owning a gun.

* 2020s: ~30–40% report owning a gun (depending on the survey).

* **Concentration of ownership:**

A smaller share of people own guns, but those who do often own **multiple firearms**. Some estimates say **half of U.S. guns are owned by ~3% of the population** (“super-owners”).

### Why this matters

* It explains the paradox: **per capita gun ownership goes up while household ownership goes down.**

* Politically and culturally, this means gun enthusiasm is concentrated in a smaller but very committed subset of Americans.

also, are you suggesting that if we had less guns that this murder rate compared to the rest of the developed world would be way higher? that defensive gun uses brings it down from being super high? what exactly are you arguing? do you think brings murder rate down or just violent crime rate? reglardless, you have the statistics mixed up, as my last post shows.

Also that little example highlights some issues. No one said the boy who was followed home had his life threatened or endangered. So what happens is every time theres a conflict, or more often than ideal, someone has to die? Thats life tho theres always conflict but that doesnt justify someone getting killed every time.

Also yes we could triple the amount of people owning guns. Or what if everyone carried around guns? Would defensive gun use sky rocket? Of course. But so would the murder rates. And not every time a gun is used to kill when defensively is it justifiable

Let's forget this retarded stat that more guns equals more gun deaths,

Calling the stat retarded doesn’t mean it isn’t a relevant fact, there is no rational reason to “forget” it.

what people want to know is if having freedom and having guns is safer than not having guns.

No, it isn’t. Studies show that guns are much more likely to be used in violent crime, get stolen, result in a fatal accident, or be used in a homicide than for protection. Firearm ownership is also associated with a significantly higher risk of suicide. A 2020 Stanford study found that men who own handguns are eight times more likely to die by suicide, and women are 35 times more likely, compared to those who don't.

Are you less likely to be violently attacked if you have means of self defense and the stats show that no you are in fact safer by not being a soft target.

No, the stats do not show that lie by any stretch of the imagination. Studies show that people living in homes with handguns are shot to death at a higher rate than those in gun-free homes. The increased risk was especially high in domestic violence incidents.

In study after study, the “stats” show conclusively that firearms kept in homes are more likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, a criminal assault, or a suicide attempt than to be used in self-defense.

To support your position, you only need to “forget” all the data and call all the stats “retarded”, which I'm sure you will do.

Debunking the ‘Guns Make Us Safer’ Myth - Center for American Progress

Defensive Firearm Use Is Far Less Common Than Exposure to Gun Violence | Rutgers School of Public Health

Women in homes with handguns are at 50% higher risk for suicide, study finds - Media Coverage - Stanford Law School

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutions/research-reports/gun-violence-in-the-united-states

Safest country on Earth is Japan. 

Nope, Japan isn't even one of the top ten safest countries on Earth.

The safest countries on Earth are Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, Denmark. Switzerland, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, and Finland.

Japan isn't even one of the top ten safest countries on Earth

It is by homicide rates.

International comparisons are unhelpful because there's too many near-impossible-to-quantify factors that come into play, like loss of social cohesion, a "culture of violence", etc., as well as more readily understood ones like racial composition (the United States has a browner population than most Western countries), rates of single parentage (also higher in the US than in any other Western country), etc.

But here's what we can quantify: guns are used some 500,000 - 3 million times a year in self-defense, compared to around 300,000 violent crimes facilitated using a firearm.

https://www.heritage.org/gun-rights/commentary/12-defensive-gun-uses-show-armed-citizens-make-communities-safer

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18319/chapter/3#15

A comprehensive 2021 study by the CDC arrived at a figure of 1.6 million defensive gun uses.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4109494

So let's break this down.

In 2023, about 18,000 homicides involved a firearm. While I am admittedly conflating statistics compiled from different years (Google refuses to answer the simplest frigging question), let's suppose for the sake of argument that that 300,000 figure is still largely accurate. This would mean 6%, or about 1/16th or 1/17th, of all violent crimes involving a firearm turn into a murder. We can take this to more broadly mean that 6% of all criminals who have the clear and relatively unchallenged option of killing their victims elect to do so.

We don't know what percentage of those 1.6 million attempted crimes involved the criminal being in a position to kill their victim. A lot of it could be, say, a carjacking while they thought the owner was away. But if we assume that "just" 1 out of 4 cases met this description, this would suggest that guns saved 6,000 more lives than they took (not counting suicides or accidents) in 2023.

Yes, excluding suicides and accidents. I am perfectly comfortable excluding suicides since that is a personal choice freely made. Likewise, there were around 500 accidental gun deaths in 2023, which means you can knock this figure down to 5,500 but is still a net surplus for the fact of gun ownership.

Also yes we could triple the amount of people owning guns. Or what if everyone carried around guns? Would defensive gun use sky rocket? Of course. But so would the murder rates. And not every time a gun is used to kill when defensively is it justifiable. and, if defensive uses sky rocketed, would that mean suddenly 1 in four more lives were saved? no, of course not. the more there are defensive uses of guns, the less likely they are to have actually saved a life. plus, it does seem pretty high up there that one in four times that someone's life is saved when a crime occurs

also blacks might be more likely to kill than whites, and we do have more blacks than other countries, which could indicate that it's a racial problem, but we have this stat which strongly indicates gun cause more murders than when guns aren't involved.

-You can tell this is a gun problem, not just a bad person problem as the gun lobby says, also by comparing non-gun homicides of similar countries as the USA, and then adding guns to the mix: non-gun homicides are slightly on the higher side but within normal range, while gun homicides go wildly higher. If this was a bad person problem at its core, there would be a wildly higher amount of non-gun homicides as well, but that's not the case. Included is an article describing this phenomenon and a link with a picture. 

https://i.imgur.com/skcT8qr.png

https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/71n1u2/gunnongun_homicide_rates_in_oecd_countries_for/

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/canada-gun-control-debate/566102/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=2018-07-28T09%3A00%3A12

and, the gun stats above indicate state by state comparisons, and what they indicate, in general is that gun control works and that the presence of guns increases the likeihood of death, no matter what international comparisons say. just one study or correlation might not mean much, but if you take all the stats in the opening post as a whole, it's clear that guns cause an increase in the liklihood of murder and that gun control probably works.

All your cases are linked to gun use. Therefore guns kill more in America because there are simply more guns in America.

The points about domestic violence are also missing the point. Men involved in domestic violence are more likely to be steeped in machismo culture, and men steeped in machismo culture are more likely to own guns. Take away the guns and these would still be men steeped in machismo culture with the physical capacity to kill their wives/girlfriends. If such a man wanted to kill his wife/girlfriend but didn't have a gun, he could grab a blunt object and bludgeon her to death, or grab a knife and stab her. At present they generally don't because that more convenient option is available, but take away that option and they'd go for the next "best" thing.

Would the survival rate in these attacks be higher without guns? Sure. But guns also give wives/girlfriends the option of plausibly defending themselves against a much stronger attacker. It's difficult if not impossible to quantify how often this happens; a woman who points a gun at her partner for a couple of seconds to escape a bad situation leaves behind no visible crime scene. Women in these situations often don't report the incident to the police, perhaps to avoid provoking their abusers or out of fear that they themselves would be charged for threatening him, and the abuser certainly won't if the full story would land him in jail for battery.

of similar countries as the USA

There are no similar countries to the USA. Everywhere else is either like Europe/Japan (to whom we are simultaneously worse off than by many metrics and richer than for the most part) or like the Third World. The unique mix of conditions which exists in this country is without either historical or modern parallel.

"SO are you using stats on individual gun ownership as a type of red herring to avoid the chart above which conclusively prove that societies that allow guns are safer"

I already showed u that that graph is misleading. The per capita use of guns has increased but the actual number of people owning guns has decreased. Per capita use is misleading then. Plus u idiotically say your simple little graph proves your position while you just ignore the overwhelming weight of all the stats in the opening post

You can tell this is a gun problem, not just a bad person problem as the gun lobby says, also by comparing non-gun homicides of similar countries as the USA, and then adding guns to the mix: non-gun homicides are slightly on the higher side but within normal range, while gun homicides go wildly higher. If this was a bad person problem at its core, there would be a wildly higher amount of non-gun homicides as well, but that's not the case. Included is an article describing this phenomenon and a link with a picture.

https://i.imgur.com/skcT8qr.png

https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/71n1u2/gunnongun_homicide_rates_in_oecd_countries_for/

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/canada-gun-control-debate/566102/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=2018-07-28T09%3A00%3A12

How do u wiggle out of this? If this is a bad person problem then non gun murders should be wildly out of whack too in the usa. Thats overwhelmingly implied in the data

Did you send me the same message twice?

Not sure what u r referencing but I edited the message cause of technical difficulties.

That stat that gun murders are comparatively wildly out of whack but not nongun murders. Very revealing and not really possible to wiggle out of

Would you be willing to convert all of America to look like Sweden, Switzerland, or Japan with a single national culture if it meant less deaths overall (including gun deaths?)

If you're going to murder someone, you'll use the best tool available. Guns are the best tool for this job, so they're most commonly used. But if you don't have a gun, then you'll use the second best tool available. The underlying desire to commit murder is the same, and will be acted upon regardless.

Rather than comparing the US to other countries (which I'm sure always conveniently leave out Switzerland), a better comparison would be crime/murder rates in a given country in the years shortly before vs shortly after a gun ban took effect. Were rates of gun violence climbing/remaining at a steady high right before, only to sharply fall afterwards? And if so, was said fall permanent?

This is the kind of evidence you want to produce in order to convince me. Not that gun rights don't exist, because they do and are inalienable for law-abiding citizens regardless of the actions of a minority or of some utilitarian calculation. But at least of the underlying point of this thread, which is that gun widespread ownership increases overall rates of violence over the long term compared to no widespread gun ownership. You could convince me of that with indisputable evidence.

SO are you using stats on individual gun ownership

No shit, it is individuals that own guns and individuals that commit violent crime, the stats that are relevant are the ones that compare the differences between gun owner's vs people that don't own guns. You claim is that gun ownership reduces the chance you can be a victim of a violent crime, the stats prove conclusively that the opposite is true.

as a type of red herring to avoid the chart above which conclusively prove that societies that allow guns are safer

Oh pulease, first correlation is not causation, and there is no reason to think those two stats on your chart are even in the ballpark of proof of your point.

You say, "societies that allow guns are safer" and then show us an unrelated graph, your contention requires that we look at international stats to actually compare societies, those stats demonstrate conclusively that societies that allow guns are not safer by any stretch of the imagination.

The only thing your chart shows is that the US gun fetich is unrelated to crime, you guys claim it's fear of crime that motivates you to buy your guns, but your stats show that just isn't true, the NRA just programmed you to say that. Sorry Rambo, but it isn't based on evidence, it's based on the movies you watch.

The debate surrounding gun ownership, public safety, and the U.S. Constitution remains one of the most prominent issues in contemporary American policy. Opponents of widespread firearm proliferation argue that empirical scientific data demonstrates a clear connection between high rates of gun availability—or lax regulation—and an increased likelihood of death. Furthermore, arguments rooted in history and jurisprudence suggest that the traditional reading of the Second Amendment prioritized well-regulated state militias over an unrestricted individual right to self-defense.

Scientific Consensus on Gun Availability and Homicide Rates

A central theme in gun control arguments is that the presence of firearms significantly increases the likelihood of death across a wide range of settings. Literature reviews analyzing international evidence show that where firearm availability is restricted through stricter policy, murder rates tend to be lower (Vox; LA Times). A body of research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health indicates a consistent correlation across geographical regions: areas with more guns systematically experience higher homicide rates (Harvard Public Health).

At the individual level, access to a firearm inside a household correlates with a higher personal risk of fatal violence (American Journal of Epidemiology). This dynamic is particularly evident in domestic contexts, where women living in homes with firearms are five times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner (NCBI). Moreover, research suggests that the presence of firearms escalates interpersonal disputes into lethal encounters, as opposed to serving primarily as a defensive tool (Harvard Gun Threats).

Policy, Mass Violence, and Law Enforcement

Beyond general homicide statistics, research highlights specific policy outcomes related to mass violence, youth safety, and law enforcement. States with stricter firearm regulations report fewer mass shooting incidents (The Hill). Furthermore, state-level regulations correlate with lower rates of youth gun mortality (ABC30). On an international scale, comparisons show that high school students in the U.S. face vastly higher chances of being shot than their peers in other developed nations (Health Affairs).

Overall gun violence figures in the U.S. remain markedly higher than in 22 other high-income nations (CBS News). Comparative studies argue that this outcome is driven primarily by firearm availability rather than broader violent crime or mental health trends (Vox Crime Analysis; NYT Mass Shootings; Vox Mental Illness). Studies also indicate that non-gun homicides in the U.S. fall within comparable norms to other high-income nations, whereas firearm homicides spike drastically (Reddit/OECD Homicide Data; Imgur Data Visualization). Analysts studying international models point to countries like Canada (The Atlantic) or Australia—which instituted a widespread buyback program that coincided with significant declines in homicides and mass shootings (Vox Australia Buyback)—as examples of regulatory frameworks.

The presence of firearms also impacts law enforcement environments. Studies indicate that police officers are more likely to be shot in areas with high gun availability and weaker control laws, while officer-involved shootings also increase in high-risk environments (Justice Not Jails; NBC News). To address these trends, experts advocate for evidence-based policies, such as universal background checks and red flag provisions, which often enjoy broad public backing (NYT Expert Policy Ranking; Vox Overview of Gun Violence).

Addressing Common Counterarguments

Proponents of gun control frequently address common counterarguments regarding street gangs, quotation accuracy, and constitutional history:

1. Gangs and Crime: Analysis of crime statistics suggests that violent deaths cannot be attributed solely to gang activity, showing that overall homicide rates remain significantly elevated even when excluding gang-related incidents (HuffPost).
2. Founding Quotations: Historical research indicates that popular pro-gun quotes attributed to Founding Fathers like George Washington are often taken out of context or misquoted. In original context, statements regarding an armed citizenry referred to a well-disciplined, state-organized militia rather than unrestricted individual gun ownership (Buckeye Firearms; Gawker; PolitiFact).

Legal History and Constitutional Interpretation

From a legal standpoint, scholars highlight that early American gun regulation included strict rules regarding gunpowder storage, concealed carry bans, and militia registration requirements (Mother Jones; Politico; The Conversation; The Doctor Weighs In; The Daily Beast). Linguists and legal historians argue that the original understanding of the phrase "bear arms" specifically referred to military service within a organized militia rather than individual self-defense (History News Network; Washington Post).

The shift toward treating firearm possession as an individual Constitutional right is a relatively recent development in American jurisprudence, culminating in cases like District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and subsequent judicial standard tests (SCOTUSblog; Kryo 2nd Amendment Archive).

Justice Burger and the Traditional Interpretation

This evolution stands in contrast to the historical consensus that governed Second Amendment interpretation for most of the 20th century. Former Chief Justice of the United States Warren E. Burger, a conservative appointed by President Richard Nixon, strongly criticized the modern reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.

Justice Burger advocated for the traditional "collective right" model, maintaining that the Second Amendment was drafted specifically to prevent the federal government from disarming state militias, rather than to guarantee an unregulable individual right to personal firearms. In a 1991 interview, Chief Justice Burger famously characterized the lobby-driven push to re-read the amendment as an individual right as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word 'fraud'—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." Under this older interpretation, reasonable gun regulations—ranging from background checks to bans on certain classes of weapons—were fully consistent with the Constitution, as the text explicitly links the right to keep and bear arms to the maintenance of a "well regulated Militia."

None of the studies above admit that people with guns kill people.