I would like to see that chart with 'homicides' instead of just firearm-centric ones. I crunched these numbers several years ago for my own amusement and found that in countries with strict gun control, violence in general and violent deaths especially went WAY up, surpassing the US's by a fair margin. No I don't have a source at the moment, it was a weekend's worth of Googling trying to find data that didn't come from biased sources (either the NRA on one side, or groups like the Violence Policy Center on the other), and done purely for my own amusement.

Here you go, intentional homicide rate (as per United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime data) per 100,000 inhabitants:

  USA        4.66
  Canada     1.58 (US murder rate 3.0x higher)
  UK         1.13 (US murder rate 4.1x higher)
  Australia  0.99 (US murder rate 4.7x higher)
  Germany    0.86 (US murder rate 5.4x higher)

On the numbers you crunched, which western countries "with strict gun control" did have a higher murder rate than the U.S.?

>On the numbers you crunched, which western countries "with strict gun control" did have a higher murder rate than the U.S.?

Mexico, most of Central America, most of South America, most of the Caribbean, some of Oceania.

What is interesting is that Washington State, Montana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine all have very similar homicide rates to their Canadian neighbors.

Ok, I see, but most of those are not considered "western countries" as per Huntington, as they are not comparable in economic development, HDI, etc. Apple and oranges.

I was referring to comparable nations, primarily to the anglo-saxon countries on the above list really comparable to the US. The U.S. has 4x more murders than the average of the western countries above. That is 4x, food for thought.

If you control for Ango-Saxon admix, it seems that the US will have a very similar homicide rate to other Ango-Saxon nations. Higher, perhaps, but probably only by a bit:

http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2013/07/22/yout...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_St...

4 times higher

Also, this map pretty much demolishes the 'violent USA' and 'loose guns controls cause homicide' theories:

http://www.unitednorthamerica.org/images//MurderRate2007.jpg

If you know basic arithmetic you should be able to point the flaw with that map. I'm pretty sure that this is what the NRA uses in their speeches.

If its so obvious, share with us.

How do you figure that?

The first link gives an upper bound of 1.32x higher... and it'd probably be a solid bit less given that youth murder rates are higher than adult murder rates...

I understand that you might be unhappy with the US murder rates, and you are trying to paint a different picture. I get that. But lets not make up cases, exclude/include different scenarios, races, demographics, etc., a la politicians, I thought this was Hacker News, facts over bullshit. Macro numbers are what they are: "Total Murders divided by Country's Population".

I'm not talking about the cause behind the murders, but just the rate. But hey, bottom line, believe whatever you want, I'm not here to make you hear what you want.

If you want to determine the cause behind that macro number, you control for it.

No bs.

The fact that both of this weeks' shootings occurred in jurisdictions with stricter gun control laws than Canada's is evidently irrelevant.

Correlation does not imply causation.

He's not implying causation. The idea that stricter gun control laws cause shootings is ridiculous. He's disproving the causation that stricter gun control laws stop violent shootings.

I'm not referring to gun control, where do I imply this?