There does not appear to be a correlation between how many guns there are per person (how widespread gun ownership is) and the likelihood of you being the murder victim in a mass shooting/killing spree like the one that is being reported in Colorado, USA. Broadly speaking, GDP per capita could be a better indicator of the likelihood of you being the murder victim in a massacre. However….
As soon as the news came out about a gunman shooting dead 12 people in Colorado at a movie theatre showing “The Dark Knight Rises”, the media started talking about gun control as they always do when incidents like this happen.
Given that the answer to murderous rampages is always fewer guns, according to the politicians in the UK and not so much in the USA, I thought I would do some of my own analysis to work out if guns were the problem.
Here is the thing I wanted to find out.
1. Does increased firearm ownership increase the chances of people being the murder victim in a massacre?
Sources
Here are the figures I used.
Rampage murders by country which includes the number of people killed by country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers#Annotation
The numbers used were from all the regional categories as well as Workplace Killings and School Massacres.
To Find The Population Of Each Country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
To Find Out How Many Guns Are In Each Country And How Many Guns There Are Per Person
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
Analysis
The graph shows how many guns there are per death against how many people there are in a country per murder victim in a massacre.
The orange line shows how many guns there are in a country per death in a massacre in that country.
The countries which have the most deaths per weapon are on the left and includes Australia, the UK and New Zealand.
On the right hand of the scale you have the countries with the least number of deaths per weapon. The countries on the right include the USA, Mexico and Russia.
So what does this mean?
The UK for example has fewer guns per victim of a massacre. In other words, in the UK, Australia and New Zealand a gun is more likely to be used in a mass murder than in the USA, Russia and Mexico.
Going back to this source Australia has 15 guns per thousand people and so does Mexico. So in short the number of guns per person is not related to how likely you are to be the victim in a mass shooting.
The blue column shows how likely a person in that country is to be the murder victim in a massacre.
On the left side of the graph we have the UK with a 1 in 130 million chance of a person being a murder victim per year (assuming the murder statistics are taken from last 100 years).
On the right hand side of the graph we have the USA where you have a 1 in 106 million chance of a person being a murder victim per year (again, assuming 100 years).
Here are the numbers
Country | Killed | Guns per thousand people | Population | Population per person killed | Number of guns | Number of guns per death |
Tunisia | 12 | 0.1 | 10,673,800 | 889,483 | 1,067 | 89 |
New Zealand | 13 | 22.6 | 4,433,870 | 341,067 | 100,205 | 7,708 |
U.K. | 45 | 6.2 | 62,262,000 | 1,383,600 | 386,024 | 8,578 |
Australia | 35 | 15 | 22,676,566 | 647,902 | 340,148 | 9,719 |
Finland | 10 | 32 | 5,412,930 | 541,293 | 173,214 | 17,321 |
South Africa | 29 | 12.7 | 50,586,757 | 1,744,371 | 642,452 | 22,154 |
Spain | 19 | 10.4 | 46,185,697 | 2,430,826 | 480,331 | 25,281 |
Switzerland | 14 | 45.7 | 7,952,600 | 568,043 | 363,434 | 25,960 |
Sweden | 9 | 31.6 | 9,495,113 | 1,055,013 | 300,046 | 33,338 |
Yemen | 32 | 54.8 | 24,527,000 | 766,469 | 1,344,080 | 42,002 |
France | 43 | 31.2 | 65,350,000 | 1,519,767 | 2,038,920 | 47,417 |
Germany | 41 | 30.3 | 81,859,000 | 1,996,561 | 2,480,328 | 60,496 |
Turkey | 14 | 12.5 | 74,724,269 | 5,337,448 | 934,053 | 66,718 |
China | 95 | 4.9 | 1,347,350,000 | 14,182,632 | 6,602,015 | 69,495 |
India | 73 | 4.2 | 1,210,193,422 | 16,577,992 | 5,082,812 | 69,628 |
Canada | 14 | 30.8 | 34,863,700 | 2,490,264 | 1,073,802 | 76,700 |
Italy | 9 | 11.9 | 60,813,326 | 6,757,036 | 723,679 | 80,409 |
USA | 294 | 88.8 | 313,955,000 | 1,067,874 | 27,879,204 | 94,827 |
Russia | 9 | 8.9 | 143,100,000 | 15,900,000 | 1,273,590 | 141,510 |
Mexico | 11 | 15 | 112,336,538 | 10,212,413 | 1,685,048 | 153,186 |
So in the USA you are around 30% more likely to be the murder victim in a massacre than in the UK but this is more than cancelled out by the fact that the USA has 1,300% more guns per person than the UK.
Again, the number of guns per person has no bearing on the likely hood of a person being the victim of a massacre.
The USA is the extreme example, if we again compare Mexico and Australia who have the same number of guns per person we can see that in Australia you have a 1 in 60 million chance of being the murder victim in a massacre per year whereas in Mexico you have a 1 in 1 billion chance of being the murder victim in a massacre.
Again, the number of guns per person has no bearing on the likelihood of a person being the murder victim in a massacre.
Conclusion
For the media and politicians to simply say guns are the problem whenever there is a massacre is incorrect. There is no evidence to support this.
And more than that, the data only includes countries that have had a documented massacre. There are many countries in the world with high levels of gun ownership and yet there has never been a massacre in the past 100 years. For example Serbia, Switzerland, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Uruguay, Norway and the list goes on.
Even when you just look at the countries that have had massacres there is no evidence of a correlation between high levels of gun ownership and the likelihood of a massacre.
When you take into consideration the countries which have never seen massacres and yet have high levels of gun ownership, any possibility of there being a correlation is completely and utterly blown out of the water.
It may seem counter-intuitive but facts are facts. I will be honest. When I first started researching this topic I expected to see a negative correlation, ie the higher level of gun ownership the less likelihood of massacres, to find that there is no relationship whatsoever surprised me and shows that the news media and politicians would do well not to jump to conclusions.
I would encourage the media to look deeper at the situation and to at least attempt to explain what is the real driving force driving people to murder.
One thing that should be remembered by those that believe tighter gun control laws are the answer.
Someone who is intent on committing mass murder does not care what the law is. Tighter gun control laws only effect law abiding citizens.
The fact that in countries where gun controls are strict, for example the UK, Germany, South Africa, Australia, there is more or less the same chance of a gun being involved in a massacre as in the USA demonstrates that mass murderers will find a way to obtain a gun regardless of what the law is and how few guns there are.
Your number of guns per country are wrong. And your source link is wrong too. The US has around 300,000 guns. So it’s a tenfold miss. Then, you use population per person killed as proof that your chances of being killed are lower in the US, when it’s the opposite. The lower the number, the higher your changes of being killed! 1 killed in a room of 10, is much more risky than 1 killed in a room of 100. Duh!