Gun Owners are the True 99 % -- BOTE Math on American Gun-Related Deaths, by Mike Blessing

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 703, December 30, 2012
"Put some nice, long, jaggedy teeth in the Bill of Rights"

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Gun Owners are the True 99 %—BOTE Math on American Gun-Related Deaths
by Mike Blessing
[email protected]

Special to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

For the uninitiated, "BOTE" stands for "back of the envelope" – cocktail napkins rip and tear too much to used for anything other than as napkins.

32,000 – annual number of firearms-related deaths in America (source: CDC)

270,000,000 – number of guns in America's private sector (BATFE estimate – other estimates double or triple this number)

Now we simply divide the first number (32,000) by the second number (270,000,000) to get a guesstimate of the number of guns involved in fatal incidents in America. Granted, this is rather inaccurate in that it assumes that each fatality involved a separate gun – the recent spree killers in Aurora, Colorado and Newton, Connecticut that Senator Feinstein is gleefully using to justify her latest victim disarmament scheme used the same firearms to kill multiple people. The fact is, that VD movement was rather stagnant here in the States after the year 2000 – this is just what the Senator needed to kick-start it back to life. As the adage goes, "never let a crisis go to waste."

(32,000) / (270,000,000) = 0.0001185185 – that's 0.0118518519 % of American guns are the ones that "kill people in America" (guns don't kill people – when was the last time you saw one fly around on its own, load itself, point itself at anyone and pull its own trigger? But try telling that to an advocate of victim disarmament.)

So to comply with the Senator's demands, allegedly to prevent spree killers like Lanza and Horton, the other 99.9881481481 percent of American gun owners simply must give up their liberty and property. Never mind that the 99% here never engaged in such evil, nor have any desire to do so.

Never mind that the 1994 "assault weapon" ban signed by Waco Willie Clinton was a dismal failure in stopping such massacres (or any other sort of crime) – the 101 California Street shootings were carried out using two pistols that the State of California had declared illegal six years before (the crappy Intratec TEC-9). What Feinstein wants, Feinstein is determined to get, and to Hell with the truth, or the consequences.

Calculations done with Libre Office Calc

Here's some more from the international scene:

Figure 1 – Gun-related deaths vs guns per capita, by country
The data used to make the above graph [PDF]

Sources for the above graph

List of countries by firearm-related death rate, Number of guns per capita by country

Graph made using Gnumeric

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