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Number of Murders, United States, 2009: 15,241

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2009: 9,146

Number of Murders, Britain, 2008*: 648

(Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,240 US murders)

Number of Murders by[pdf] firearms, Britain, 2008* 39

(equivalent to 195 US murders)

*The Home office reported murder statistics in the UK for the 12 months to March 2009, but these are 12-month figures).

For more on murder by firearms in Britain, see the BBC.

The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita over all. In the case of Britain, firearms murders are 48 times fewer than in the US.

Do hunters really need semi-automatic Glock hand guns? Is that how they roll in deer season? The US public doesn’t think so.

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Note: There were many requests for hyperlinks in this posting, so I put them in. Statistics always exhibit some discrepancies from source to source, so I’ve adjusted the figures to fit the most authoritative Web sources I could quickly find, instead of trying to discover again the original sources. The discrepancies pale in significance before the magnitude of the difference between over 9000 gun murders in the US annually and less than a hundred in the UK, which was my point. By the way, someone should tell Google that statistics are unreasonably difficult to find on the Web and someone could get rich with a better algorithm for Almanac-like knowledge.