Finland has almost as many households (as a %) with guns as the U.S. (38% for Finland vs 42% for the U.S.) yet the U.S. has about 19x the per capita gun homicide rate of Finland.
Now compare the gun violence rate of both of those countries with the gun violence rate of somewhere that bans guns.
Maybe we’ll see that Finland has a route to further reduce their gun violence.
Having looked into it a bit, I was essentially right. England mostly bans gun ownership, their gun violence rate is half that of Finland’s. In Japan, they have even tighter controls on firearms, the gun violence rate there is 30 times lower than Finland’s.
Removing guns from the situation absolutely seems makes a huge measurable difference. If you believe math.
counting by household is blatantly spinning the data to ignore households with more than one gun. why should we do that? even just households with two guns are not crazy outliers and vastly change the comparison.
also the US cannot require gun registration so we really have no idea how many guns are actually out there. only about 1 million guns are registered. 400 million seems to be the low estimate but could even be over 500 million. on the other hand the vast majority of finland’s firearms are registered.
also what kind of guns are we talking about? iirc Finns get a standard issue rifle for military service. Handguns are more often used in crime (and probably suicide).
Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?
The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.
The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.
Wikipedia says that 12% of Finns own a gun, so I’m not sure where you’re getting 38% of households.
Finland also does not allow owning guns for personal protection, open or concealed carry, has mandatory military service, and most of the guns owned are long guns used for hunting and sport shooting. To get a license for a pistol you have to be over 20 and demonstrated over 2 years of experience sport shooting pistols.
I got it from Wikipedia. Households and people are different statistics. People includes children who are unlikely to own a gun.
I also prefer households as a statistic over guns per capita because it avoids the issue of gun collectors who may have hundreds of guns in one household…
Finland has almost as many households (as a %) with guns as the U.S. (38% for Finland vs 42% for the U.S.) yet the U.S. has about 19x the per capita gun homicide rate of Finland.
Now compare the gun violence rate of both of those countries with the gun violence rate of somewhere that bans guns.
Maybe we’ll see that Finland has a route to further reduce their gun violence.
Having looked into it a bit, I was essentially right. England mostly bans gun ownership, their gun violence rate is half that of Finland’s. In Japan, they have even tighter controls on firearms, the gun violence rate there is 30 times lower than Finland’s.
Removing guns from the situation absolutely seems makes a huge measurable difference. If you believe math.
counting by household is blatantly spinning the data to ignore households with more than one gun. why should we do that? even just households with two guns are not crazy outliers and vastly change the comparison.
also the US cannot require gun registration so we really have no idea how many guns are actually out there. only about 1 million guns are registered. 400 million seems to be the low estimate but could even be over 500 million. on the other hand the vast majority of finland’s firearms are registered.
also what kind of guns are we talking about? iirc Finns get a standard issue rifle for military service. Handguns are more often used in crime (and probably suicide).
Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?
The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.
The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.
Wikipedia says that 12% of Finns own a gun, so I’m not sure where you’re getting 38% of households.
Finland also does not allow owning guns for personal protection, open or concealed carry, has mandatory military service, and most of the guns owned are long guns used for hunting and sport shooting. To get a license for a pistol you have to be over 20 and demonstrated over 2 years of experience sport shooting pistols.
I got it from Wikipedia. Households and people are different statistics. People includes children who are unlikely to own a gun.
I also prefer households as a statistic over guns per capita because it avoids the issue of gun collectors who may have hundreds of guns in one household…
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Yeah but people in Finland are out raking forests all day to prevent wildfires which leaves very little time for mass shootings.
Well yeah that’s sort of the point. The presence of guns alone does not predict gun violence. You need violent people for it to happen.