Gun control

I'm not going to deny it, without guns there will still be homicide, suicide, etc. But firearms are still the most common firearm weapon in the United States. http://www.therichest.com... http://www.fbi.gov... With this data, it is undeniable that gun control will lower homicide and suicide rates. You bring up many countries that have high murder rates, but one country you didn't talk about is Australia. In 1996 a mass-shooting killed 35 people in Port Arthor. Two weeks later the Prime Minister at the time passed pretty much the most strict gun restrictions in history. Around 650,000 automatic and semi-automatic weapons were destroyed. During the course of a decade there was a 59% drop in gun related homicides (non-gun related stayed level) and during the course of the same ten years there were no mass shootings. High murder-rates are common is mid-income countries such as Russia, Mexico, Brazil, etc. Different countries have different reasons for high murder rates, for example Mexico and Brazil have some of the highest drug rates in the world. That is most likely the reason for their high crime rates. With Russia they have many poverty, inequality, and social problems. Next I would like to talk about robberies, most specifically armed robberies. In 2012, 354,520 robberies were committed in the USA. This resulted in a whopping $414 million in losses. Unless you are some kind of ninja you probably aren't going to rob a modern store (security systems, alarms, cameras, etc.) without a weapon. Bottom line you won't get your money unless you have some kind of weapon and again in America the handgun is the most popular one! "On the contrary, the US, with the most guns per head in the world, has the highest rate of deaths from firearms, while Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, has the least." (Source is at the bottom) "In some of the recent mass shootings " for instance those in Aurora, Tucson, Oak Creek, Virginia Tech " it has been suggested that the killer was mentally ill and that lack of treatment was a bigger issue than gun ownership. With this in mind, the New York-based doctors looked in their study not only at the relationship of gun ownership to firearms deaths but also mental illness. They examined data from 27 developed countries, using gun ownership figures from the Small Arms Survey and deaths from the World Health Organisation, the National Center for Health Statistics and others. They also looked at crime rates compiled by the United Nations for an indication of the safety of each country. More guns meant more deaths, they found. "The gun ownership rate was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death," says Bangalore. "Private gun ownership was highest in the US. Japan, on the other end, had an extremely low gun ownership rate. Similarly, South Africa (9.4 per 100,000) and the US (10.2 per 100,000) had extremely high firearm-related deaths, whereas the United Kingdom (0.25 per 100,000) had an extremely low rate of firearm-related deaths. "There was a significant correlation between guns per head per country and the rate of firearm-related deaths with Japan being on one end of the spectrum and the US being on the other. This argues against the notion of more guns translating into less crime. South Africa was the only outlier in that the observed firearms-related death rate was several times higher than expected from gun ownership." High rates of mental illness in any country, on the other hand, did not predict more gun deaths."(Source at the bottom) Sources: http://www.bloomberg.com... http://www.therichest.com... http://www.fbi.gov... http://www.theguardian.com...