Israel Matzav

Obama: Gun violence in US 33x Israel

Here are the stats: Per population, we kill each other with guns at a rate 297x more than Japan, 49x more than France, 33x more than Israel.

— President Obama (@POTUS) June 21, 2015

If you go here, you will see that the US does have the highest number of guns per capita in the world. But....

The figures do also not directly represent the number of guns available, since in some countries, such as Israel and Switzerland, a significant number of civilians have government-owned military guns in their possession, which would not be included in the figures below.^[5]

How significant is that? This significant:

Much of the debate is focused on gun ownership rate data for 109 countries from the Small Arms Survey. There are real problems with this survey. For example, the rates of gun ownership for Israel (7 per 100 people) and Switzerland (supposedly 47 guns per 100 people) .  Anyone who has ever been to Israel knowns that this estimate is ridiculously low.  Indeed, over time about 12 to 15 percent of the adult Jewish population in Israel is allowed to carry handguns in public.

And that's not counting military issue guns that are carried in public.

The problem with this survey excludes weapons that are technically owned by the government. The vast majority of guns in Israel are technically owned by the government, but if people have possession of guns in their homes for decades, the issue should be that public possession, not who technically owned the guns.  Similarly, at that time of the Small Arms Survey, all able bodied Swiss males between the age of 18 and 42 kept their military weapons in their homes. After age 42, they could apply for permission to continue to keep their military weapons. Israeli guns are also excluded for the same reason.

The Small Arms Survey claims that the United States has by far the highest level of gun ownership, with 88.8 guns per 100 people. Both Israel and Switzerland probably have much higher gun ownership rates, but including them the way the Small Arms Survey does biases the results to The US gun ownership is so high compared to other countries that it drives any regression results.

Much higher gun ownership rates, and much lower homicide rates. I also have to wonder how many of the Israeli homicides are - you guessed it - terror attacks.

Let's put it this way: On the whole, the streets of Jerusalem are much safer than the streets of any major American city.

Hmmm. Maybe there's another reason aside from gun ownership that US homicide rates are so high?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, gun control

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:09 PM