Civilian firearms per 100 people: - US = 120.5 vs Canada = 34.7
Share of adults with guns: - US = 32% vs Canada = 19%
Share who CARRY a gun: - US = 26% of handgun owners carry all the time and 32% most of the time vs Canada = almost nobody carries
Source: ChatGPT
> Source: ChatGPT
Please tell me this is a joke?
- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...
- https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/guns-an...
- https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2025001/article...
See Sealioning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
For ChatGpt answers we reasonably expect to cite actual sources rather than "Source: ChatGPT".
For Wikipedia, most of us just stop at "Source: Wikipedia".
“Source: ChatGPT” frequently doesn’t include the link to the original chat, so is hard to verify that is the actual output, and we all have experience with ChatGPT wholesale making up facts when it is led towards the conclusion, or just inventing facts and sources.
I personally treat ChatGPT “facts” like “facts” from Reddit or Meta. There might be a grain of truth in it, but treating it like an actual source is a fool’s game.
It's decent enough for high level technical explanation, but anything opinionistic needs to follow the source trails.
There are 153k people who have legal firearms (so about 10% of the adult population, vs about three times that in the US). That's largely farmers with shotgun licenses (NI is pretty rural by European standards) plus licensed "weapons for personal protection" for people exposed to threats for whatever reason as a legacy of the Troubles.
And then there are some unknown number with illegally-held guns - the main armed groups put their weapons "beyond use" as part of the decommissioning process in the 2000s, but inevitably some will have been missed, and then there are the dissident groups who still hold significant amounts of weaponry.
Hard to put an exact figure on it, but if you guesstimate it at a weapons ownership rate at about half that of the US you probably wouldn't be too far from the truth.
So even after accounting for the differential in gun ownership, SFPD are still shooting people at ~25x the rate of the PSNI.
PPW holders will be people who have had specific, verifiable threats made against their lives - so will often be people with links to violence, terrorism, or criminality. And, obviously, the unlicensed users are criminals by definition.
So, on balance, the average weapons owner in NI is probably more dangerous than the equivalent in the US. I do agree that it's hard to make anything more than a very general comparison between the two very different situations, however.
By comparison in my county in Washington state, there are 114,000 active concealed firearm permit holders out of a population of 2.3 million. And this is a liberal, fairly urbanized region.
We're talking ~50x the rate of people carrying firearms legally. Of course data on criminals carrying weapons is not so transparent, but it's suffice to say that American police are much more regularly encountering people with firearms.
It’s a very American mixture of fear and bravado in a feedback loop which means every piece of evidence of cowardice has to be compensated for with even more overt aggression.
Hence cops in full body armor with guns drawn behaving like black and tans in Palestine.
Of course it's not like American cops have recognized the danger that poses and politically aligned themselves with reducing or restricting access to guns, so they lose a lot of credit there, but they are genuinely facing a better armed and therefore more dangerous population.