Is there a correlation between gun ownership and firearm deaths?

The answer is obvious, correct? Not if you ask Wayne LaPierre, who thinks more guns is the answer to a safer America. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nra-guns-in-schools-would-protect-students/

Let’s analyze some data to get some better insight into this question.

The below chart shows the following:

• Gun ownership in different countries (per 100 people).
• Annual firearm deaths in these countries (per 100,000 people).

Note: This chart only shows countries with GDP of $25,000 per person. I will explain why later.

Chart A: Included nations with GPD of $25,000 or more

Methodology for this chart.

I used the following data sources to gather the data for this chart.

List of countries by firearm-related death rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Number of guns per capita by country - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Taking this data, I included all countries listed with:

• Gun ownership data (per 100 people),
• Firearm death data (per 100,000 people), and
• GDP of $25,000 or more, and
• Used the gun ownership data from low to high to create the primary line in the chart.

As you can see, I did not normalize or dejitter the data. However, the data seems to support a logical correlation between the two variables.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there. — Anton Chekhov

Where in the world is China?

You will notice there are some countries that are missing from the chart including China, Russia and Cuba. The reason is not to cheat the chart, but instead that the source Wikipedia pages does not have this data from these countries. I am guessing their countries are either guarding or do not have reliable metrics for this data. I expect that China and Russia would fit the $25,000 GDP or more chart. No idea on Cuba.

Why the $25,000 GDP per capita threshhold?

3rd World nations, especially Latin America are off the charts for firearm deaths.

I ran the data for all the countries where Wikipedia had the gun data. Here is what the chart looked like with no GDP threshhold.

As you see by this chart, the following countries massively skew the chart:

• El Salvador
• Columbia
• Honduras
• Swaziland
• Brazil
• Jamaica
• Venezuala
• Panama
• Uruguay

I did not take the time to investigate why these 9 countries had such a high firearm death rate. My speculation is that the following factors are causing these high firearm death rates:

• civil unrest (rebel fighting),
• drug violence (narco violence), and
• weak or ineffective policing.

GDP per capita of $25,000 or more in blue, GDP per capita or less than $25,000 in orange