More Guns = More Death
Joel Shurkin, in "The actuarial cost of gun violence in the U.S." (2 June 2005), summarizes the results of a report (yet to be published) that looks into the cost of handgun violence in the US. These are the bits of his gloss that I found the most telling.
In a study to be published in September in The Journal of Risk and Insurance, Jean Lemaire, a professor of insurance and actuarial science at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, takes on the actuarial cost of the Second Amendment. And the result is staggering.
Lemaire points out that in 2000, the U.S. recorded 11,000 firearm deaths. The European Union, with 25 percent more people had fewer than 1,300. Japan had 22. Looking at that same year, Lemaire pointed out a study showing that gun violence costs the U.S. society $100 billion annually or $360 for every American. But that might not be the most serious cost.
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He does not think Americans are more violent than other people. He also thinks the notion that if we didn?t have so many guns we would find other ways to do each other in specious. If you compare two similar cities, Seattle and Vancouver you find that 41 percent of people in Seattle have guns while only 12 percent of people in Vancouver do. The rate of assault with a firearm is seven times higher in Seattle, and the homicide rate is 4.8 times higher. The people in Vancouver didn?t resort to knives and hatchets to commit mayhem when denied guns. They just committed fewer murders.The evidence is clear, he concludes: The availability of handguns in Seattle increases the assault and homicide rates with a gun, but does not decreased the crime rates without guns, and that restrictive handgun laws reduce the homicide rate in a community.
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on Tuesday, 7 June 2005 at 00.00
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Very interesting.
I've long believed we Americans pay a horrendous ongoing price simply because there are so many people who: A, Don't know how to behave; B, Know how but regularly choose not to behave; C, Almost never behave; and D, Mean to behave most of the time and have a clue about what's required but still can't quite manage it.