Focus50
Posts: 3962
Joined: 12/28/2004
From: Newcastle, Australia
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quote:
ORIGINAL: punisher440
"I recall it was Kirata also posting figures that didn't include suicide by gun as being a gun death. What do you suppose they actually did die from? Don't think he counted accidental gun deaths, either.... Thing is, that's how overall figures are compiled for every country - the *cause* of death, not the motivation behind them.
Anyway (from a link, in another thread, in another month....), there were some 231 gun deaths in Australia in 2010 (pop 23 mill), of which 160ish were suicides. Near enough to your 2/3rds ratio, too.... Only about 16 deaths were part of a criminal activity. Anyways, pick a number and multiply it by 15 (US population) and come back and tell us how well your figures stack up in comparison and that you don't have a problem with gun culture there. "
Studies have shown that not having access to a firearm does not prevent someone from committing suicide,the suicide rates stay the same at least here in the U.S.So you can quit trying to pad the U.S. totals with the ones bent of their own destruction.Subtracting those deaths puts the U.S. at a little more than 11,000 in the latest figures I have found...yes,still more than Oz but Oz does NOT have the drug problems we have over here and much of the violence is associated with it.Trying to compare the U.S. and Australia just won't work.To illustrate the problem look at the country south of the U.S. ....Mexico.It has very tight gun controls yet with around a 1/3 of our population,they have almost 27,000 murders a year.Brazil with slightly more than half our population has almost 41,000,Columbia with around 15% of our population has over 14,000 deaths a year.And these are intentional homicide numbers,not padded from suicides.I have also provided links before showing that in several major U.S. cities,the homicides were a criminal shooting another criminal,in some cities as high as 90% with the average seeming to be in the mid 70% range.In one city,the criminal that was killed had an average of 12 prior convictions.If you think the gangs and criminals that live here are going to give up their guns,you really do live in Oz.
This was all covered in the recent gun threads - coulda swore you said here earlier that you participated there?
Anyway, one more time just so I can be the one telling everyone ad nauseum about the US's 30,000 annual gun deaths....
First off, I don't get to pick what qualifies as a gun death. Nor do you! Whoever compiles the stats applies the same criteria to all countries. If you're embarrassed at the US totals (and any fair-minded American likely is or should be), that's a reflection of *your* gun culture rather than a matter of fiddling the figures.
Yes, I do agree that suicide is not about the means used. But your country's gun culture enables that one particular means to contribute adversely to gun death stats. That'd be the proliferation of guns in your society. More guns means availability to more people (not necessarily just the gun owner) and thus they figure more prominantly in suicide, accidents and crime etc in the US than they do in other modern western nations - *none* of which you've bothered to include in your gun death comparison stats here.
From Wikipedia (for memory) the gun death rate in Oz is 0.09 per 100,000 and in the US it's 3.7 per 100,000. In other words a whopping 41 times higher in the US, when double would make a damning statement. Yet our respective suicide by gun rate is almost identical at 2 out of 3 of total gun deaths. You're living in blind, ignorant denial a mile underground if you think means and opportunity (to obtain & use guns) doesn't play a significant role in death by gun - even when it's "only" suicide.
So what of those other 10,000 US gun deaths? I quoted earlier that in 2010, we had 16 crime related gun deaths here. I think accidents were similar and "other" (whatever that means) made up the rest and second highest total to suicide. Personally, I think 16 (crime related) seems light but anyway, multiplying by 15 amounts to 240 for a comparable US population. Your thoughts - 240 out of 10,000?
Focus.
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