I suspect that measures _legal_ gun ownership. I'd venture to guess that almost all guns in Mexican citizen hands (not, say, police or army) are owned illegally.
My comparison of rates of gun ownership was US-Canada. IIRC, Canada's rate of gun ownership is about 1/3 ours. *goes to the intarwebs to check* OK, if Wikipedia is to be believed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership) the US has 90 guns per 100 residents and Canada has 31.5 per 100. Which is not exactly 1/3 but close enough I can see how 1/3 might have gotten into my brain.
My point was that "high" and "low" don't mean much.
guns/person isn't really an interesting number anyway, what's far more interesting is gun-owners/person. In canada it's about 26% (according to the intertoobs) .
In the US, it's about... 26% (80M) It's just that gun owners here tend to own more than one.
So your point is that the US and Canada have roughly the same percentage of gun owners. Presumably you're OK with agreeing that Canada's rate of violent crime is drastically lower than the US's rate.
Which leads me back to the original point, that gun ownership and rates of violent crime are completely uncorrelated. Done now.
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Re: You could just as easily say
And yet, violent crime is dropping, while gun ownership is rising.
Re: You could just as easily say
My comparison of rates of gun ownership was US-Canada. IIRC, Canada's rate of gun ownership is about 1/3 ours. *goes to the intarwebs to check* OK, if Wikipedia is to be believed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership) the US has 90 guns per 100 residents and Canada has 31.5 per 100. Which is not exactly 1/3 but close enough I can see how 1/3 might have gotten into my brain.
Re: You could just as easily say
My point was that "high" and "low" don't mean much.
guns/person isn't really an interesting number anyway, what's far more interesting is gun-owners/person. In canada it's about 26% (according to the intertoobs) .
In the US, it's about... 26% (80M) It's just that gun owners here tend to own more than one.
Re: You could just as easily say
Which leads me back to the original point, that gun ownership and rates of violent crime are completely uncorrelated. Done now.