Re: Firearm Justification!
Let's see...
Of that 39,000, two thirds are suicides. Suicides seem to be one of those things where cultural habits show up in choice of method, and there is no particular indication that suicide rates track with gun ownership when you compare different countries. I suspect that the suicide methodology in the UK is different,
Ah yes. UK suicides 52% suffocation and hanging. 2% firearms. Looks like a lack of firearms isn't keeping the Brits from offing themselves. So we can safely surmise that roughly 2/3 of US firearms deaths would be deaths with or without firearms. After all, British suicides found 8 different classes of ways of killing themselves they use more often than guns. One suspects the Americans are as resourceful.
Roughly 43% of American households have guns.
Other countries have high ownership rates - Iceland, Germany, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Sweden, Uruguay, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, Serbia, Finland, Switzerland. Running my eye over the list I can see 9 of 14 countries, all of which have more than 30 civilian firearms per 100 people, which IIRC, do not have high rates of firearms violence.
While the US has more than 100 guns per 100 people, this is a fairly useless statistic for most purposes. A person with 15 guns is not intrinsically more dangerous or better armed than a person with 5 guns... you can only effectively use one at a time, and 5 of them can cover off most common use cases, up to and including dangerous game/predator defence.
We can estimate the number of gun owners in the US another way. From presidential votes, we can say that the numbers of Republicans and Democrats is fairly similar... the difference between those votes in the last election was no more than about 1% of the population. We have data on percentages of Republicans and Democrats that own gun, and if we average those numbers we should have a good estimate of the percent of gun owners in the US ((41+16)/2 = 28.5%), if they've been telling the truth to the surveyors... which is true of any country.
Most countries seem to have fewer guns per person, and, indeed, many countries have a limit on the number of guns one can own, whereas in the US you can have as many as you can afford. So the countries on our >30 guns/100 people list should have a fair bit more than .3 of the US likelihood of gun ownership... yet most of these countries have significantly lower firearms homicide rates.
That's because gun violence is controlled by culture - by what you consider appropriate under various circumstances, not merely by having a gun available.
I will also note that the survey everyone quotes for gun ownership only counts civilian guns. There is not accounting for government owned guns distributed to the civilian population, and thus fully accessible to them, in countries like Switzerland and Israel. If you count those households, I'm pretty sure you will find Switzerland is more heavily armed, and with fully automatic military weapons, than the US... but still not shooting each other in economy sized lots.
On the other hand, countries with extremely restricted gun ownership and draconian gun control laws, such as Mexico or Haiti, can have quite high levels of firearms homicides.
It's not the laws, it's the culture. If you want to find the roots of the American tendency to use guns to resolve problems and issues, look to the myths of the American West, and the pedestal on which they put their military... and their war myths.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
