Guns and and the culture of violence in America

Posted Dec. 17, 2012, at 1:34 p.m.

Here’s an interesting statistic: The country with the second-highest rate of gun ownership in the world is in Yemen, a largely tribal, extremely poor country. The highest is in the United States, where there are almost as many guns as people — around 300 million guns for 311 million people.

But here’s another interesting statistic: In the past 25 years, the proportion of Americans who own guns has fallen from about one in three to one in five. However, the United States, unlike Yemen, is a rich country, and the average American gun-owner has four or five firearms. Moreover, owners are utterly determined to keep their arms no matter what happens.

What happened in Sandy Hook, Conn., is the seventh massacre this year in which four or more people were killed by a lone gunman. The fact that this time, twenty of the victims were little girls and boys, six or seven years old, has caused a wave of revulsion in the United States, but it is not likely to lead to new laws on gun control. It’s not even clear that new laws would help.

Half the firearms in the entire world are in the United States. The rate of murders by gunfire in the United States is almost twenty times higher than the average rate in 22 other populous, high-income countries where the frequency of other crimes is about the same. There is clearly a connection between these two statistics, but it is not necessarily simple cause-and-effect.

Story continues below advertisement.



In medieval Europe, where everybody from warlords to peasants were on their own when it came to defending property, rights and person “honor,” the murder rates were astronomically high: 110 people per 100,000 in 14th-century Oxford, for example. It was at least as high in colonial New England in the early 17th century.




None of this explains the specific phenomenon of gun massacres by deranged individuals, who are presumably present at the same rate in every country. It’s just that in the United States, it’s easier for individuals like that to get access to rapid-fire weapons. And, of course, the intense media coverage of every massacre gives many other mentally unstable individuals an incentive to do the same, only more of it.

But only one in three hundred murders in the United States happens in that kind of massacre. Most are simply due to quarrels between individuals, often members of the same family. Private acts of violence to obtain “justice,” with or without guns, are deeply entrenched in American culture, and the murder rate would stay extraordinarily high even if there were no guns.



Recommend this article


Similar Articles

More in Opinion