opinion

A differing view of statistics on guns, murder

A recent letter states that “the U.S. is first among 218 world nations in guns per 100,000 persons, but not even in the top 100 for murders per 100,000.” I commend the writer for citing his sources, but it should be said that he has cherry-picked data to make his argument.

A Wikipedia source that he cites qualifies its statistics, saying that “intentional homicide demographics are affected by changes in trauma care, leading to changed lethality of violent assaults, so the intentional homicide rate may not necessarily indicate the overall level of societal violence.” It may be that the excellent trauma care pioneered by U.S. medical systems in response to our wars and domestic gun violence saves shooting victims at a high rate, not that shooting incidents here are lower than in less developed countries.

In the Harvard Journal of Law article cited is this claim: “by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violence‐ridden nations.” Yet, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report cited from Wikipedia shows a 2012 intentional homicide rate of 1 per 100,000 in the UK vs. a 4.7 per 100,000 rate in the U.S. If both sources are to be believed, there is clearly a difference between “violence” and “homicide” here.

That same UNODC report shows that U.S. intentional homicide rates are higher than those of all Western European countries, Australia, Canada or China, and higher than or equal to all nations of Saharan Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The countries whose rates are worse than ours are largely narco-states of Central and South America, the Central African nations, Russia and the war zones of the Middle East.

So the question is, do we want the U.S. to be a leader in citizen safety, or do we want to console ourselves by being merely better than the worst?

Ware is a retired professor of photography (Santa Monica College) and former Los Angeles-based commercial and editorial photographer now living in Biltmore Lake.