Reminder: Americans Own Almost Half of the Guns in the World, and Our Violent Crime Is Declining

October 6, 2019 in News by RBN Staff

source: www.gunpowdermagazine.com
by: Teresa Mull

A talking point liberals – and notably, the Democratic candidates running for the 2020 presidential election – are fond of making, is that there are “too many guns” in America, and we have a violent crime “problem.”

Of course any violent crime is too much. But is America really that unsafe? And are guns to blame?

Reuters reported last year:

The Small Arms Survey, an independent global research project based in Geneva, Switzerland, found that there were more than 1 billion firearms in the world, of which civilians owned 85 percent, while the rest were held by militaries or law enforcement agencies.

The number of guns owned by civilians globally rose to 857 million in 2017 from 650 million in 2006, the survey said. There were 120 guns for every 100 U.S. residents in 2017, it found, followed by Yemen with nearly 53 firearms per 100 people.

“The biggest force pushing up gun ownership around the world is civilian ownership in the United States. Ordinary American people buy approximately 14 million new and imported guns every year,” survey author Aaron Karp told reporters.

Keep this in mind when you read what Pew Research reported last year:

Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century. The two most commonly cited sources of crime statistics in the U.S. both show a substantial decline in the violent crime rate since it peaked in the early 1990s. One is an annual report by the FBI of serious crimes reported to police in approximately 18,000 jurisdictions around the country. The other is an annual survey of more than 90,000 households conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which asks Americans ages 12 and older whether they were victims of crime, regardless of whether they reported those crimes to the police.

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