[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

Is it simply perception that we have so many gun deaths in the US?

A 2011 UN report said that we have 5 gun killings per 100,000 citizens. that same report shows that Switzerland, which is considered to have one of the lowest gun deaths, has .5 per 100,000. I realize that that is ten times greater, but when an amount is such a small sampling of the whole, the difference is insignificant. It should also be mentioned that about 70% of all gun deaths in the US were suicides and a small percentage were accidents or justified killings such as self defense. So it appears that we have about 1.5 deaths per 100,000 citizens by aggression by gun.

Look at it this way. If you were buying a house for $100,000 and I offered you a discount of $.50 and someone else offered you a discount of $5.00 for a similar house, would a discount of ten times have any any bearing on your decision?

The US is actually about in the middle of a chart listing various country's gun deaths per 100,000. Honduras is near the top with about 64 yet are 87th in guns owned per capita. Switzerland is fourth in gun's owned per capita yet is near the bottom of the list of gun deaths per capita.

I think that the fact that we had these crazy mass shootings gives the perception that we've got millions of people running around shooting each other. We have the highest number of guns owned per capita of any country in the world, yet we are in the middle of the number of guns deaths per capita.

There doesn't seem to be a correlation in the number of guns owned per capita and the number of gun related deaths per capita.