The Reason the US Homicide rate is 30 times that of the U.K and Japan: Easy Availability of Firearms

It is so heartening to see so many working so hard to find ways to curb and reduce the gun violence that is America’s ugly calling card and mournful fact of life.

And it is so disheartening to see so many working so hard and so passionately to unleash open and concealed carry of deadly firearms on U.S. society. They do so without any acknowledgement that their actions ensure an increase in the U.S. level of firearms-related murder, suicide and wounding that already dwarfs those of all other industrialized democracies around the world.

Sadly, many of the states with the highest rates of firearm mortality (in the South and West) are the same states whose legislatures are pressing aggressively ahead to allow unrestricted open and concealed carry, Alabama the most recent, just this week.  In contrast, the states of the northeast report a firearm mortality rate one-fifth that of the deadliest states; (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm.)

Something just doesn’t add up in this incredible divergence of views, actions, values and concern for the health and safety of fellow Americans and of our society overall.

To this writer, it is important to highlight this divergence and to make those supporting greater open and concealed carry take responsibility for the brutal level of violence in our country.

Those working to expand unrestricted open and concealed carry try to rationalize their actions by speaking of freedom and liberty as though the U.S. is unique with respect to both, and that such liberty justifies the annual cost in lives, the 20,000 murders and 24,000 suicides each year.

This logic fails from the get-go and goes nowhere but into a bloody dead end. 

The countries of Europe and Japan are free democracies with firearm mortality rates but a shadow of that of the United States.  Their citizens enjoy freedoms akin to those in the U.S.; the U.K. is an excellent country of comparison, where democracy and individual rights have flourished in a parliamentary democracy for centuries. 

As I noted in a recent tweet, the starting point of British gun legislation is that Great Britain’s “firearms policy is based on the fact that firearms are dangerous weapons and the State has a duty to protect the public from their misuse”.   Read on to be encouraged about what one other country of freedom has in place to ensure greater public safety (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/firearms-law-guidance-to-the-police-2012/guide-on-firearms-licensing-law-accessible-version). 

Makes one wonder how we lost our way here in the United States, where the gun lobby justifies their position citing old, pre-revolutionary English practice, mired in a frontier mentality.  Meanwhile, the British sensibly moved on to make theirs a safer country by far.

So clear, so logical, so appropriate for a modern society contending with the firepower of modern weapons.

We should be challenging the gun lobby and supporters at every turn to explain and to justify the excessive and dangerous level of US gun violence, so far above those of other countries.

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Better Life Index provides a reliable basis (https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/) for judging the abysmal state of affairs in our country.  The OECD’s data on national safety conditions incorporates data on homicides in the Organization’s 38 country members.  The U.S. has the fifth highest homicide rate, calculated at 6.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, or more than double the 2.6 per 100,000 for the 38 OECD member countries over all. Only Colombia, Brazil, South Africa and Costa Rica rates are higher.

But most other OECD countries have far fewer homicides, with Russia’s 4.8 per 100,000 inhabitants the one closest (but below) to the US level and Canada’s 1.2 per 100,000 but one-fifth that of the US.  For example, the Netherlands’ and Norway’s homicide rate, at 0.6, is one tenth that of the US.  Remarkably, and to be envied, the homicide rates of the U.K., Japan, and Luxembourg are but 0.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, or just one thirtieth that of the United States.

The previous U.S. administration mandated that government public health agencies turn a blind eye to gun violence statistics and analysis.  Nonetheless, FBI data report that 74 percent of homicides in America involve firearms, an observation that makes it doubly clear that firearms are the driving force in the appalling U.S. statistic in the OECD study.

How can this tragic reality not get leaders’ and fellow Americans’ attention?  And how can this reality not motivate sensible responses to what is happening on the streets and in the homes across our country?

To say that 44,000 firearm deaths each year, almost half homicides, is simply the price of freedom is no answer at all.  But if it were, it would be heartless and a willful acceptance of the country’s decline as a world leader and as a society to be admired in this modern age.

I would hope that politicians and media figures supported by the gun lobby would be challenged with these facts and this comparison every day, at every town meeting, and every opportunity. 

But this is not enough.  We need to challenge such politicians and media notables at every junction with the credible facts and history of the Second Amendment and challenge the mis-guided narrative that they have built so carefully and relentless over recent decades, that the Second Amendment justifies firearms anytime and anywhere.  It doesn’t.

Sadly, this crucial effort is coming late.  Red state legislatures are seeking to take advantage, emboldened by their impression that the Supreme Court is more influenced by gun lobby politics than reasoned jurisprudence. 

As the Court labors toward its summer ruling on concealed carry in NYRPA v Bruen, we need to make the incredibly high U.S. level of gun-related deaths and violence a public issue that the Supreme Court Justices simply will not be able to ignore and must reckon with as individuals taking responsibility for so many thousands of future deaths and victims.

Please do your part, the country deserves your best.