Douglas W. Popeye Frederick wrote:

That hardly sounds like the Swiss that I know.  Afterall, don't forget
that this is the 'peace loving' and 'neutral' country that's quite
armed to the teeth (even Hitler didn't mess with them) and who (cough)
"accidentally" invaded another soverign country this past February.

Thanks, but I'll go do the research myself now.

-hh

Harvard Journal Study of Worldwide Data Obliterates Notion that Gun
Ownership Correlates with Violence
     Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Confirms that Reducing Gun
Ownership by Law-Abiding Citizens Does Nothing to Reduce Violence Worldwide

     By now, any informed American is familiar with Dr. John R. Lott, Jr.'s
famous axiom of "More Guns, Less Crime." In other words, American
jurisdictions that allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second
Amendment right to keep and bear arms are far safer and more crime-free than
jurisdictions that enact stringent "gun control" laws.

     Very simply, the ability of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms
has helped reduce violent crime in America.

     Now, a Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy study shows that this is
not just an American phenomenon. According to the study, worldwide gun
ownership rates do not correlate with higher murder or suicide rates. In
fact, many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder
and suicide rates.

     In their piece entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and
Suicide? A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence, Don B. Kates
and Gary Mauser eviscerate "the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and
that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths." In so doing, the authors
provide fascinating historical insight into astronomical murder rates in the
Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they dispel the myths that widespread
gun ownership is somehow unique to the United States or that America suffers
from the developed world's highest murder rate.

     To the contrary, they establish that Soviet murder rates far exceeded
American murder rates, and continue to do so today, despite Russia's
extremely stringent gun prohibitions. By 2004, they show, the Russian murder
rate was nearly four times higher than the American rate.

     More fundamentally, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser demonstrate that other
developed nations such as Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark
maintain high rates of gun ownership, yet possess murder rates lower than
other developed nations in which gun ownership is much more restricted.

     For example, handguns are outlawed in Luxembourg, and gun ownership
extremely rare, yet its murder rate is nine times greater than in Germany,
which has one of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe. As another
example, Hungary's murder rate is nearly three times higher than nearby
Austria's, but Austria's gun ownership rate is over eight times higher than
Hungary's. "Norway," they note, "has far and away Western Europe's highest
household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The
Netherlands," in contrast, "has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western
Europe (1.9%) ... yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the
Norwegian."

     Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser proceed to dispel the mainstream
misconception that lower rates of violence in Europe are somehow
attributable to gun control laws. Instead, they reveal, "murder in Europe
was at an all-time low before the gun controls were introduced." As the
authors note, "strict controls did not stem the general trend of
ever-growing violent crime throughout the post-WWII industrialized world."

     Citing England, for instance, they reveal that "when it had no
firearms restrictions [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries],
England had little violent crime." By the late 1990s, however, "England
moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many
types of long guns." As a result, "by the year 2000, violent crime had so
increased that England and Wales had Europe's highest violent crime rate,
far surpassing even the United States." In America, on the other hand,
"despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United
States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the
1990s."

     Critically, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser note that "the fall in the
American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of
the world," where 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office
suffered violent crime increases during that same period.

     Furthermore, the authors highlight the important point that while the
American gun murder rate often exceeds that in other nations, the overall
per capita murder rate in other nations (including other means such as
strangling, stabbing, beating, etc.) is oftentimes much higher than in
America.

     The reason that gun ownership doesn't correlate with murder rates, the
authors show, is that violent crime rates are determined instead by
underlying cultural factors. "Ordinary people," they note, "simply do not
murder." Rather, "the murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial
aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership" in
their society.

     Therefore, "banning guns cannot alleviate the socio-cultural and
economic factors that are the real determinants of violence and crime
rates." According to Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser, "there is no reason for laws
prohibiting gun possession by ordinary, law-abiding, responsible adults
because such people virtually never commit murder. If one accepts that such
adults are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it,
disarming them becomes not just unproductive but counter-productive."

     John Lott couldn't have stated it better himself.

"Lee Bell" <pleebell@bellsouth.net> wrote:

Saying that we have less than 1 gun per person just sounds kind of lacking.