• chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    There are around 400 million civilian-owned guns in the US. That’s almost half the entire world’s civilian-owned firearms. The US doesn’t have anywhere close to half the world’s homicides.

    With the recent uptick in gun gomocide rates, we reached nearly 20,000 in 2022. That’s obviously very high. But if if we had 20 years straight of those horrifying death numbers, the odds of any specific gun being used in a homicide would still be less than 1/1000.

    We have a violence issue in the US, no question, but if 0.01% of guns were used in homicide annually, the murder rate would be doubled. The fact is that the vast, vast majority of gun owners aren’t what you say they are.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      22 days ago

      I didn’t call them homicidal maniacs. Most gun owners in the US are under educated hateful bigots because most people in the US are. The only convincing stats on what I was talking about would be percentage of gun owners that experienced a home instrusion, had access to a firearm during the intrusion, and did or did not discharge the firearm. I wasn’t able to locate such data but this would be interesting. American gun owner’s don’t need positive assumptions being made about them in the absence of data.