Thursday, April 3, 2014

quick stats on guns

Took some data from Wikipedia, and since I do not anymore have an account there, putting these up here. There was a shooting in a military installation on 02.04.2014, which is not surprising, as military handles guns regularly. Also there's been some talk recently of domestic use of guns  so I was a bit surprised that wikipedia didn't have any images on gun related deaths. Getting the sources correct is of course difficult and I didn't try to improve nor expand on wikipedia sources. The first image is a bit misleading since I left all of Asia, Africa, Central and South America out. Also there weren't any statistics on many many countries so if your country isn't listed wikipedia is to blame. Oh, also, the scales are just what was the quickest way of checking relative positions between countries they may not represent what they say, so the recommended procedure for spreading these is to make one self.






It looks like visits from USA have increased somewhat after this went live so the short take away wrt this country are as follows: 

1. for a western (and some of the former eastern block) country, USA has a quarter to a third (c.30%) more gun-related deaths than it should have considering the amount of gun-ownership.

2. it looks like USA citizens are near the average in solving their problems by shooting if we look at the whole world, looking at western world only, USA is in the highest third in their trigger happiness (if you think death by gun causes this too).

3. made also an image (unpublished) of how many of the guns in a country are used in a gun-related death. However, this should be multiplied by the number of people in these countries to get more solid statistics so leaving this out. For USA the number is 1 in 8641 (so be careful when buying the 8641th gun, it might kill you)

General observations: 
1. deriving from the 2nd image, it's obvious that the world hasn't yet reached a normal distribution regarding gun-related deaths. What to think of this, is harder to put to words than I want to have publicly published.