[competentone]

If you are going to look at the issues of gun ownership and crime rates across different countries, then you should not ignore the question of why the gun homicide rate is so extreme in countries like Great Britain, Japan and Australia when measured against the total number of privately owned firearms in those countries.

You need to look at the gun homicide rate measured against the total number of guns in a country. (Remember, those seeking to control firearms are suggesting there is a relationship between the number of guns and the gun death rate.)

Most numbers I've heard suggest that there are roughly 250 million privately owned firearms in the United States -- roughly a gun for every man, woman and child.

Japan, Great Britain and Australia have how many privately owned guns? Maybe a few thousand? Only one firearm per how many thousand people?

Comparing our thousands of deaths involving the use of a firearm with just the hundreds of deaths in countries like Great Britain, Japan and Australia, at first blush, might make our country look like it's an extremely violent place, but if you consider that their gun deaths happen with only thousands of privately owned firearms you come to a shocking conclusion:

If Japan, Great Britain or Australia had a population with the same "saturation" of guns as we have here in the U.S. -- and if they kept their same "deaths per owned gun" rate, their populations would be wiped-out virtually overnight!