Originally Posted by keesje
I think the kind of guns for sale in the US are only available for government services in most of the world.
No, not true. Sporting rifles are NOT, repeat NOT, government weapons, nor are they law-enforcement weapons.
This hunting rifle:
Is exactly the same as this sporting rifle:
Just as this looks like a race car:
It's really just one of these with a paint job, a wing, and some fancy wheels:
There is absolutely zero functional difference between the two guns. They are both Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifles used for varmint hunting on ranches. They are not 'assault weapons' or 'assault rifles', nor is the bottom one any more dangerous than the top one. They are identical in function, if not form. They fire the same exact round .223 Remington, the same exact way - one bullet each time you pull the trigger.
Originally Posted by keesje
The resulting number firearm-related deaths is truly astonishing compared to other civilized countries. More then 20 as much as UK, 10 times as Australia, 5 times as Canada.. And the reason behind it is totally clear, to the rest of the world..
That's actually a very unrealistic comparison. If nobody else has guns or ready access to guns, one would expect more firearm-related deaths in the society that does have guns. So, not quite an apples-for-apples comparison. It does prove that if you have access to guns, you will likely have people who die from guns. Something to keep in mind is those other countries have restricted access to a limited number and type of guns, yet they still have gun death. And our murder rate is not 20 times that of the UK, it's about 8 times according to the UK home office and the FBI.
Remember that we are over 322,000,000 people, so the total numbers are quite large, yet as a percentage, it's relatively small. 3.2 per 100,000 citizens are murdered (including non-negligent manslaughter) each year. The UK is only about 0.4 per 100,000, so we're 8 times as likely to be killed with a gun. However, in the UK, there are far fewer guns (approx 4,000,000 according to gunpolicy.org), those that do exist are heavily regulated and the overwhelming majority are shotguns as well. Still, with that in mind, when you consider there are about 120,000,000 guns in the US, it would appear that we're actually more responsible overall than the fewer legal gun owners in the UK. While the US has 30 times the number of guns as the UK, our murder-by-gun rate is only 8 times that of the UK. It's not the guns.
If the US access to guns caused the high rate, we should have a murder rate 30 times that of the UK, but we don't. Here's more: Your Swiss cousins are all armed to the teeth, required by the Swiss government to retain their military rifles after their compulsory service. Every single Swiss home has at least one rifle - military rifles. Yet, they have some of the lowest crime in the whole of the western world. My point? The guns are not the problem. Access to guns is not the problem. You've been fed a line of propaganda for so long you cannot even accept any other possibility. Guns are merely tools - they have no moral character - they are not good or evil, naughty or nice - they are inanimate objects.
Since we can prove that neither the number of guns nor the availability of guns is a good predictor of murder, why do you ban them? I guess it must be because it promotes a culture of violence. With that in mind and since it's clear to everyone else in the 'civlizied world' that guns are bad and hence, they've banned them from most folks' access, one should expect that the US would have the most violent crime. The assumption being that guns cause all the violence - or else, why ban them since it's not the murder? That, however, is not the case. The US has lower overall violent crime (murder, rape, arson, aggravated assault, and home invasion burglaries) than a good deal of the 'civilized world' and our murder rate overall, not just firearm-related, is actually reasonably comparable on a per capita rate (which is the only realistic way to compare any crime statistic). Further, the UK is the most violent country in the EU according to the EU and UN statistics.
Quit watching the news. I didn't make these numbers up. Find some reliable data and investigate for yourself (not wikipedia). The US FBI publishes the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) every year available to the public. The UK Home Office does similarly, as do many other the countries. The UN publishes data it collates from various member nations - some of the data is decidedly less reliable than others based on the sources, but they do provide the generic source for their data so you can filter on your own. According to the UN, the USA is #127 on the list of murder by firearm, but now we're competing with countries like Honduras, Mexico (some of the strictest gun control laws in the world), South Africa, etc.
As an end note, my university degree is in Criminal Justice, so I've been familiar with these debates and statistics for over 25 years now.
This is a good video - around 2:30-40 there's a comparison with the UK specifically.