https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
Obviously some of it is cultural, for instance, I'm from New Zealand, and I was raised with the attitude that if you own firearms, you should (almost) never use them for shooting people. They're for target shooting and hunting. Anyway, I digress.
You can find fairly easily on the internet that different countries have different firearms homicide rates per firearm[0], for instance, it stands at 0.00009361 in the USA, and 0.00003567 in New Zealand (one of the lowest, despite relatively high ownership). Which points to cultural differences, or something else.
But, if you look at the developed nations, and look at their firearms homicide rates, you will see that the USA sits at the highest, at around 3 times the rate of the next developed country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
This is key info here. People in different corners of the world react differently to owning weapons. While some are taught to only use them as tools, others have them for fun. While some will only shoot them to kill pray, others will shoot at people. It already shows in the shooting ranges, in some parts of the world they are equipped with only numbers as target, others enjoy building a simulation close to an FPS game.
Let us break down, what is necessary to have a firearms homicide:
a) ownership of / access to a gun
b) reason to kill
b1) malicious intent
b2) self-defence, extended self-defence
- What is it that makes gun owners believe that there are no other means of defending themselves or their families but killing (or at least shooting at) the aggressor?
- Is it assumed, that if the "good guy with gun" kills the aggressor, more than one other human being is saved from death?
- Is it worth having a human killed because the good guy would have "only" faced a robbery and therefore only economical loss?
- Does crime really decrease because good guys kill bad guys?
- What is the worth of a human life, regardless of criminal background of the individual?
Because the answer to the questions above is different in each culture, country and individual I do not think comparing the aproaches of different countries to decrease crime (including firearm homicides) is helpful here. Different communities have different approaches to deal with same problems and having only <200 countries available for comparison makes it very hard to do so as a lot of criteria are just not comparable enough to be of much use. This is why we keep picking the examples that confirm our theories.
[Edit: formatting]
When the Supreme court rules that the police do not have a constitutional requirement to protect, that resides in the last mile - us. We legally cannot count on others to do this for us. And that includes even a court issued protective order .
As for a trespasser/thief, if they have no compunction of breaking the law to break and steal, how do we know they aren't armed? So you end up with Castle Doctrine - given how prevalent guns are, it's safe to assume a bad actor who has broken in has one.
The last problem with the whole gun rights, which usually makes me not comment about it, is that the US is the only country in the world that enshrines gun rights in the founding documents. (Badly written, and SCOTUS has ruled on both sides of the main interpretations). That isn't changing until the US, well, isn't.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2017/10/02/assault-dea...
The comparison always makes one thing unmistakably clear: the U.S. is an exceptionally violent country among OECD peers.
Sources? Do you mean "more guns" or "easier access to guns"?
The vast majority of gun crime is done with handguns, and much of it is already illegal - i.e. felons in possession of guns or people carrying when or where they're not legally allowed to do so.