I think a lot about this issue. As the attached post shows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate), the US ranks
12th in the per capita death rate with guns. All of the other countries
with higher per capita rates have much smaller populations (exceptions
being Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines). Brazil's death-by-gun per
capita rate is more than double that in the US, a fact that probably
most people in the world would never guess. Yet Brazil's population is
approaching 2/3 of the population in the US - no small number.
But
the US is a country that's unique in several ways. 'She' manages to put
herself and/or find herself in the world's spot light much of the time.
When there's something grand going on in the US - science, technology,
music, humor, the world knows about it. Probably more is known about
the US abroad than is known about a lot of other countries. So, too,
will the world know more about America's problems than the problems of
other countries (like El Salvador having a murder-by-gun rate that is
more than 5 times that of the US; but it has a population of only 6
million to the US's 312 million).
I also look at the comparison
of the US to its neighbor to the north. The gun-per-capita rate
comparison of the US to Canada is about 2:1. But the murder rate is way
lopsided, with the US per capita murder rate exceeding Canada's by a
large margin (there are about 4-5 murders in the US per 100,000 of
population compared to Canada where the number is about 1 per 100,000). I
think that there are some attitude differences that account for this.
The average US citizen is more entitled, arrogant, territorial (we
simply took a bunch of Canadian land more than a century ago when 'buying'
Alaska) and has a culturally ingrained right to self defense borne out
of its origins. The massacre and / or mistreatment of the native American Indian population
aside, Americans have defined themselves as adversaries or opponents to
oppressive governments - hence they left those mother lands for the US
over the last few hundred years. And when the mother lands came to the
US to take back the land or its people, the right to bear arms was
engraved in its constitution. This defiant, defend my land at all costs
has taken on absurd proportions. People buy hand guns to defend their
'land' even when that may be an apartment. And the fact that such self
defense weapons are used against one's own loved ones more than
predators by overwhelming margins, does little to change our country's
engrained right to bear arms.
I'm hoping that in the US, a
faction as popular and powerful as the National Rifle Association (NRA)
will sprout roots and become as influential in American
politics as the NRA but in the opposite direction, that of education about
gun violence, and making a stance of getting rid of guns from American
households. It could become a new American initiative, like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers has done to educate the
country to not drink and drive.
