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What's so bad about Americans having all these guns? The murder rate is at an all-time low, right? Well, sort of. More like emergency medical treatment efficacy is at an all-time high. As the gun debate reaches a fevered pitch, from Washington to Twitter to Newtown and back again, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shootings, here is some much needed context:

Popularity

5 percent: America's population relative to the world population.

50 percent: Amount of the guns on Earth owned by Americans, CNN reports.

Decreasing: The number of Americans who own guns. John Sides posts the graph at right, based on data from Gallup and the General Social Survey, showing the decline.

Increasing: The number of guns those American gun owners have.

18 percentage points: Amount the share of households who own guns decreased from 1973 to 2010. Three decades ago, 50 percent of households owned guns, in 2010, just 32 percent do,, according to University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center.

65 percent: The portion of guns in America owned by just 20 percent of gun owners. When we debate gun control, there is the inevitable claim that gun ownership is a cherished tradition held by a vast portion of the country. For an example of this, here's a National Review editorial making that case Monday. But the portion of Americans who own a whole bunch of guns is actually pretty small.