Gun control is a lie.

I may be Dutch, but I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment of the United States constitution. I think most Europeans would be scared by the idea of firearms being (fully) legalized, though. While I do support 2a, I also support common sense. Currently in the US, fully automatic firearms are illegal, and background checks are mandatory. I am completely in favor of background checks. I don’t think people with a clear history of mental health issues or a criminal record should be able to purchase or own firearms. Perhaps a mandatory, subsidized firearm training course would be a good idea, too.

Personally, my biggest argument in favor of gun-ownership is the ability to protect yourself. Here in the Netherlands, you are literally FUCKED if somebody’s pointing a knife or gun at you. You are not able to own firearms (except if you are a collector or something, you can get a permit for that), pepperspray, batons, tazers, or anything remotely useful for self-defense. The ONLY legal option is a knife, which is probably the worst option out there, as the risk of self-injury is extremely high. It’s like the government wants people to be victims of violent crimes, or something.

I mean, what are you going to do when you are getting raped? Call the police and wait 30 minutes for them to show up? “Oh sorry criminal, could you please wait half an hour before stabbing me so the police can catch you?” I once called the police because some assholes were starting a fire in a local park. Not a small one either. It took FORTY FIVE MINUTES for them to show up, I’m not joking. You cannot rely on the cops to defend your life. Only you are in control of that, and I think people should actually have the right to defend themselves effectively.

However, I’m not here to tell you what I think. You often hear arguments such as ‘guns kill people’ or ‘more guns will lead to more violence’. So I was wondering whether that is actually true. My hypothesis is that not guns, but social issues cause violence. By social issues, I am mostly referring to inequality of wealth, but also thing such as spending on education or mental health care, and welfare. So I went to Wikipedia, and combined the data of Gini-indexes, amount of guns per 100 people and amount of gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. My goal was to measure the correlation between the Gini-index and amount of deaths, as well as the amount of guns and amount of deaths.

The result

As you can see, the Gini-index is somewhat correlated with the amount of gun-related deaths. On the left side of the graph, both the Gini-index and amount of go down. On the other hand, gun-ownership is not correlated with the amount of gun-related deaths at all. That is what actually surprised me. Even in the US, where there are more guns than there are people, the amount of gun-related deaths is surprisingly low. I think it’s safe to assume that no, guns don’t kill people.