GUN CONTROL PUTS YOUR LIFE AT RISK

In the 20th century, far more people were murdered by genocidal governments than by armed criminals.

- DAVID B. KOPEL

ACCORDING TO GUN prohibitionists, Europe is much safer than the United States, because Europe has stricter gun control. In fact, the historical record shows that excessive gun control (as in Europe) is about a hundred times more deadly than “insufficient” gun control (as, supposedly, in the U.S.). While a lone criminal with a gun can be very dangerous, a criminal government with a disarmed population is the deadliest thing on Earth.

Let’s start with the data. If U.S. gun homicide rates had been as low as European rates in the 20th century, how many lives might have been saved? According to a 2018 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 1990—a bad year for violent crime in the United States—the age-adjusted U.S. firearms homicide rate was 5.57 per 100,000 population. That same year, the rate in Western Europe was 0.53 and the rate in Eastern Europe was 1.31, giving us a European average of 0.92.

The difference between the European rate and the American rate is 4.65 per 100,000. Since the U.S. population in 1990 was nearly 249 million, these data indicate that the U.S. had 11,785 more firearms homicides that year than it would have had if the rate had been as low as it was in Europe. If we apply the estimate of 4.65 additional gun homicides per 100,000 population to every year of the 20th century, taking into account changes in the U.S. population, we find that the United States had 745,162 more firearms homicides than it would have had under the European average.

For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that every