This groovy little left-wing infographic doesn't lie: the United States has the most gun deaths per capita of any developed nation in the world. Sure, we do better than El Salvador, but we do only slightly better than Mexico.
Mexico, people.
I mean, really - we have border states passing laws that make it legal to racially profile brown people ostensibly because the drug cartels are so violent, and yet we're barely beating Mexico in the firearm-related death rate department.
We, the United States, lead the world in guns per capita. So perhaps it's not so surprising that a country with 88 guns per 100 people is also leading the developed world in deaths by firearm.
Or is it?
Discussions of gun control always seem to come down to the tension between the two main reasons that Americans, more than any other people on this planet, are both so heavily armed and so inclined to use those arms, and those reasons are:
1) Because we can.
2) Because we want to.
The first is a practical consideration, the second is psychological, and neither is the only answer. And this is how we go in rhetorical circles on gun control without actually accomplishing anything.
It's worth noting that the number of Americans committing suicide with firearms is almost twice that of our incredible gun homicide number, with almost 20,000 people ending their own lives this way every year. Compare our numbers to Canada's, and you'll wonder how a country that has about 1/3 the number of guns that we do per capita manages to keep both their intentional and accidental gun death rates so low, despite having a similar suicide rate. Which is to say that while Canadians are intentionally killing themselves at the same rate that we are (though not choosing firearms as much, and it's worth noting that they do spend a lot more time than most our country in the freezing dark), they're killing each other, by all means including firearms, drastically less. They also have far less semi-automatic weapons and a lot more hunting rifles.
So what's the deal? Is it that Canada has stricter gun control laws? Is it that socialized medicine gives the homicidal types access to treatment before they have access to guns? Is it that they don't have a history of revolution, wars and genocide? Is it that a hunting culture gives them an appreciation for what guns actually do? Are they really just that much nicer than we are? (And why?)
Switzerland is another country that has a lot of guns - including assault rifles - but manages to keep them from being a leading cause of death in their country. Switzerland is also a country without a standing army, because the Swiss have opted for a citizen's militia as their national defense.
So, unlike us Americans stashing semi-automatic weapons in our bedroom closets as a home security system, the similarly-armed in Switzerland are so armed because they have been trained as a people's militia, with 2/3 of their men conscripted into military training. As this is their national defense philosophy (their bridges have bombs in them, too, to strand any foreign invaders within the country - Willkommen, trespasser, you are now trapped and subject to a very efficient, punctual ass-kicking), it would therefore seem that folks who have been appropriately and intensely trained to manage their weapons in the event of foreign invasion are simply a lot more judicious about using them on one another.
For one thing, threat of a common enemy is a very good bonding agent.
This is what the Second Amendment, of course, was supposed to do. The Founding Fathers did not intend for suburban mothers to be stashing assault rifles as a security system against... um, whatever it is that suburban mothers are afraid of, which in most cases is something or someone that a good dog or alarm system could scare off.
The NRA types will remind us that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." And they're sort of right, except that they're sort of wrong. Putting accidental gun deaths aside, there's no way around the fact that any homicidal person who intends to kill another person is going to have a much more difficult time doing so without a gun.
You just don't hear of a classroom full of tiny children being killed because of a knife throwing. You don't hear about the kid catching a stray poison dart in a drive-by darting. You don't hear the word "massacre" attached to the story of fistfights or baseball bats or samurai swords or grenades, even.
Guns are uniquely designed for one inherent purpose, and that is to kill. Period. Killing living creatures is what guns are built to do, and this is what they do effectively, and this is why the Founding Fathers created the Second Amendment in the first place, knowing that a well-armed civilian militia was the only kind of militia that would stand a chance against a British military attack.
The Second Amendment was written at a time when there was a very real threat to American citizens from an outside invading force, and the best defense against that threat at that time was to allow citizens (and by citizens, they of course meant white landowning men) to own guns. Yes, like Switzerland, except that in Switzerland the girls can volunteer for service too.
Unfortunately, unlike the Swiss, Americans have played fast and loose with the Second Amendment without any regard to training or encouraging a people's militia against foreign invasion or a common enemy of any kind. We in fact now have a standing military to guard against these threats, not to mention the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction on the entire planet, so who are we protecting ourselves from in the first place?
And the answer is, mostly: each other. Because the other guy might have a gun. And so goes the cycle. And this is at the core of the American psychology.
Now, we can't truly discount the Second Amendment as unimportant even with a standing military, as it does still serve its purpose for the Orwellian-minded of us. The fact of the matter is that, as unthinkable as it seems, it is possible that the United States government or some faction thereof will, at some point, be subject to a crazed ruler who will turn an armed force on the people and, without firearms, we're all goners. Of course, our armed forces also have things like tanks and night-vision goggles and flame-throwers and bombs and other implements of destruction, so realistically, we're probably goners anyway, unless you're hiding out in your nuclear bomb shelter with your tinfoil hat and stockpile of weapons, in which case you might just eventually die a less violent but equally unpleasant death of scurvy.
But, fairly, the principle of an unarmed people existing under the governance of the most supremely armed nation in the world is philosophically wrong somehow, and it's a big worry to some people.
This probably sounds crazy to most of us. But you know what else sounds crazy? Color-coded terror alerts, and the actual contents of the Patriot Act, and taking your shoes off at the airport even when you're about to walk into an X-rated X-ray machine, and a man who actually ran for President standing up on what incredibly passes as a "news station" to certain parts of the country and telling America that the reason we're having school shootings is because there isn't enough God in the classrooms.
And this brings me to, perhaps, the real reason that Americans are so hellbent on arming themselves and shooting and killing one another and themselves, and that is: fear.
We are a people that thrives on being afraid of things. Watch the news for a couple minutes and you'll hear all about the various things that should frighten us, like terrorists and superstorms and gun violence and murderers and the flesh-eating disease and the fiscal cliff and hotel bedcovers and childhood obesity and the digital divide and pit bulls and people of a different race or religion than us and Africanized bees and earthquakes and gas pedal recalls and GMO's and free radicals and the economy and global warming and balloon payments and carcinogens and Republican lawmakers and that foreign-born, non-white Communist Obama, for Christ's sake.
And this is what the 24-hour news cycle and a warmongering government has done to us. Or, perhaps our ingrained American desire to be afraid of things has simply fed them. Chicken, egg, rinse, repeat. What I do know is that, having gotten rid of network television some time ago in order to simply stream Hulu and Netflix at my leisure ("Downton Abbey" has of course taught me to be afraid of Spanish Influenza, but blessedly I hear we have a vaccine now), I find myself a lot less bothered by self-serving, overly dramatic people telling me that I need to be afraid of something, right now, again. I therefore find myself a lot less worried about all of the above-mentioned calamities, including gun violence, though I do still take those hotel comforters off immediately.
Sane, rational approaches to gun control will require sane, rational thought processes. Unfortunately, being in a heightened state of fear does not lend itself to reason. The human condition is such that we have a unique ability to experience great amounts of anxiety over things that have already occurred, or that haven't happened at all. PBS has an excellent series called "This Emotional Life" that, in one episode, explores our specifically human capacity to worry ourselves to death over theoretical threats. We call this "stress."
The show then goes on to explain that zebras don't experience this kind of stress, and that they can just hang out striping it up with each other even after a lion has just tried to eat one of them. They're not experiencing PTSD or coming up with a defense strategy after a close call, nor are they worried about the next lion. They're just eating grass and taking it as it comes. This reminds me, a bit, of the folks I met when I lived in Costa Rica, another country without a standing army, and the only country in the immediate vicinity that hasn't had a civil war in over 60 years. Pura vida, hombre, and don't bother worrying about the time either, because everyone and everything will be late, always. Tranquilo.
And so I, like so many others, am left to wonder why the American condition is so uniquely amenable to both preemptive and reactive violence, while our Canadian neighbors and gun-toting Swiss counterparts and a Central American nation that's surrounded by 3 of the 4 most gun-violent countries in the world would seem to be a least a little more like the zebras. Is it our history of revolution and massacre? Our glorification of cowboys and G.I. Joe? Our news cycle? Our racial divides? Our military industrial complex? Our child poverty rate, second only to Romania's in what UNICEF calls "economically advanced nations?" The fact that we have a standing army in the first place?
Or is it simply at this point that we have 88 guns for every 100 people, most of which seem to be purchased to guard against other Americans with guns?
I honestly don't know what the all the answers are, and debates of Chicken vs. Egg never seem to end productively. What I do know is that fixing our gun violence problem can of course be solved with less guns - this is basic math, and common sense, and possibly something for Nate Silver to address - but it's of course not as easy as that.
Numbers this high do indicate that Americans have, quite simply, a gun addiction. When you hear statements like "You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hand," it's very easy to imagine the town drunk uttering these very words in reference to his whiskey bottle, right before he freezes to death in the middle of the town square and the bottle is, in point of fact, pried from his cold, dead hand.
Here's the thing about addiction: there are the physical and practical components, and there is the psychological component, and the last is generally the hardest to break. That being the case, as for the "Because we can / Because we want to" reasons, the "Because we can" is a matter of practice and practicality, and in the short term, this is both the easier and simpler problem to address.
That is to say that less guns = less gun deaths. You can of course also say that less Americans with guns = less gun deaths, but getting rid of Americans is a lot harder to do than simply making it far less convenient for us to arm ourselves with weaponry specifically designed to quickly and efficiently kill large numbers of people. Making this sort of purchase a lot less desirable in the first place will take a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and a huge shift in the national consciousness, and in the meantime we're killing each other at an alarming rate.
I mean, we've got to start somewhere, and the zebras aren't talking.
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