Second Amendment advocates and anti-gunners have long disagreed on whether more guns lead to more crime, or less crime. While the data collected within the United States has conclusively pointed to the latter, an Oct. 22 article in The Telegraph aimed to see whether the trend held on a global basis.
The Telegraph compared data from the Small Arms Survey and the 2012 Congressional Research Service Report to create two lists: the 10 countries with the highest gun ownership, and the 10 with the highest number of gun-related deaths. If anti-gunners were right about the relationship between guns and crime, the two lists should have looked identical. However, only one country appears on both lists—Uruguay, which ranked eighth-highest in gun ownership and tenth-highest for firearm-related deaths.
The United States, with the highest per-capita gun ownership by a large margin, didn’t even make the top 10 for gun violence—and as gun ownership has risen, firearm-related deaths have plummeted. The message here is clear, but if anti-gunners haven’t cared about the facts before, why would they start now?
