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| quote: | Originally posted by Zoso
I am going to preface this by stating up front, loud and clear: I have NOT researched the statistics.
Anecdotally speaking, I can tell you that owning firearms, especially in the Southeast, is a "god given right" akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, etc. Jesus (I don't mean the dark skinned, Middle Eastern, devout Jewish Jesus, I mean the white, Sunday school picture Jesus with the long, flowing, golden locks) is, as we all know (in the US, at least), a card-carrying NRA member who owns multiple types of firearms and always votes Republican. So you start out with a large number of the population owning at least one firearm, probably even more.
Another god given right in the Southeast, especially the even remotely rural areas, is the prevalence of hunting game. Now, we have different types of weapons allowed (e.g., there is a bow season for white tailed deer, where any deer taken must be killed with a bow and arrow, etc.), but for the most part everyone is all about the "big gun" portion of the season. Big gun meaning a modern, high-powered rifle and not a muzzle loading weapon.
Some people also simply enjoy target shooting. I live in the middle of damned nowhere, and there is a shooting range a few miles from my home.
So, yeah, for various reasons you got a shit fuck ton of firearms out there. Guns increase the likelihood of a homicide in a domestic dispute situation, for example. They probably also increase the likelihood of a homicide in any situation that escalates quickly. I know that the largest metropolitan areas (Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville) are, some years, notorious for their homicide rates. Again, I have not researched the official numbers, but I would imagine those 3 population centers alone skew the stats somewhat, and would make it appear that people in every city/town in TN are just murdering the shit out of each other. But to be honest, having lived here for 44 years, there have only been a handful of times I could say I was in a situation where I actually felt like I could be in danger. And those times would be when I found myself in some of the seedier inner-city, run down areas of Nashville and Chattanooga. |
I was going to compare our gun numbers, but it's quite hard to find any good statistics on the actual amount of firearms in Tennessee, as registering firearms doesn't seem to be mandatory. I did find an estimate of around 50% of adults in Tennessee "living in a household with firearms". This doesn't say much to me as I'm under the impression that people there can live with their parents until they're 25 or something similar.
In 2007 Finland had the third highest gun ownership in the whole world. We were right behind you and Yemen. Yet our homicide rate was "only" at 2.2-2.5 at that time; an abominable number, nonetheless. I don't think the high number was only because of high gun ownership, since the majority of all homicides was committed using a knife of some sort, and still is. Guns are still a suicider favorite though.
Still today there are more than 1.5 million registered and, by estimates, 250 000 unregistered firearms* here, so I'd say we're within a ballpark of each other regarding the number of firearms per capita. There are three outdoors shooting ranges within 10 km of where I'm now, and it hasn't been so long since I last saw a reactivated AK-74 drunkenly being passed from guest to guest at a friend's house as a curiosity piece, while the host pours mint vodka shots to everyone, wearing a bullet-proof vest himself. When I visited an old co-worker for the first time, he first proceeded to show me his guns and almost immediately wanted me to test-fire the two suppressors he had made himself. It isn't totally weird to take out a .22 during a sauna break to shoot at the beer cans that were emptied during the last round. For a lot of people at these heights, hunting is what they live for. They save their summer vacation days to be used during the various hunting seasons. No one in my family has hunted in two decades, and still there are three guns meant solely for hunting at our cabin.
There are still a lot of guns here, yet somehow our homicide rates are quite different. Between Finland and Louisiana, two entities comparable by their population sizes, the rates are an order of magnitude apart. I don't know what explains the high homicide rates there, but I don't think it's only the abundance of guns.
It's weird to think that I've spent considerable chunks of my time in various parts of Eastern European cities that are considered dangerous, yet statistically, I was never in as great of a danger that I would be in if I were to go to, say, Missouri.
*I haven't actually seen very many unregistered guns, and people don't usually announce when a firearm of theirs is unregistered or illegal, but you can usually tell from where the gun is stored in the house or simply by what type of gun it is and if any law would actually permit them having one.
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