Gun control advocates like to look at other countries and use them to point out that they have strict gun control and they don't have the problems we have with so-called gun violence.
It's a common enough argument that it's really time we take it apart a bit.
Let's start with this from ConcealedCarry.com.
When it comes to firearms policy, it’s easy to get lost in the noise of talking points and manipulated data. That’s why it’s refreshing—and important—to highlight real research and voices with firsthand experience. One such voice is Ryan Petty, who tragically lost his daughter Alaina in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Despite unimaginable loss, Ryan has become a powerful advocate for effective school safety and constitutional rights.
His recent article in The Federalist, titled “Gun Control Doesn’t Stop Shootings Outside The United States, So It Won’t Here Either”, is a must-read for anyone serious about understanding the truth behind international gun violence comparisons.
In the article, Ryan pulls heavily from the exhaustive research of Dr. John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), an organization that has long been challenging the misleading claims often cited by gun control advocates. The CPRC’s data demonstrates that the U.S. is not uniquely violent when you remove cherry-picked criteria and properly account for population, socio-political context, and reporting accuracy.
Ryan is a friend whom I had the chance to talk to a week ago, almost to the minute as of this writing, in a face-to-face video interview. While I don't remember if we spoke on this particular topic on camera, we did talk about it while there.
And yeah, gun control doesn't work.
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But a lot of people don't like to accept John Lott's work because it doesn't go with the mainstream narrative.
So, let's take a look at some other statistics that can't be as easily dismissed.
The UK's total homicide rate that year was 1.17 per 100,000.
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) May 28, 2022
Czech Republic was 0.7 per 100,000.
France was 1.3 per 100,000. https://t.co/06osCdGcahhttps://t.co/vMV6Y9LDNMhttps://t.co/EuqvVejbjH
This is a couple of years ago, but the US non-gun homicide rate was much higher than these European nations' total homicide rates.
Now, this lacked the controls mentioned previously for things like socio-political context, etc. This is just a per capita rate that compares non-gun homicides in the United States against total rates in heavily gun-controlled countries.
What it tells us is that even if you did restrict guns just like these European nations, you would still have a higher homicide rate. At least some of these so-called gun homicides in the United States would be carried out with some other weapon, which means the non-gun homicide rate would increase. Plus, we've just got more guns running around on the black market, so that's not going to help, no matter what laws you pass.
The truth is that we're not Europe. We're not Africa, South America, or Asia. We're neither Canada nor Mexico.
We're unique in too many ways to accept easy comparisons with other parts of the world. Especially when you're cherry-picking what you compare, how you compare them, and fail to take any unique factors into consideration.
Unfortunately, most anti-gunners are very good and dismissing anything that doesn't confirm their worldview.
