The United States has the highest gun ownership rates in the world and the second highest rate of gun deaths among industrialized nations.
That's not a coincidence. Looking at developed nations, the U.S. is the end point of a staggering trend where the higher the rate of gun ownership, the more people die from gun wounds.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, Mark Reid, a machine learning researcher at Australian National University, has run a quick statistical analysis of gun death data in industrialized nations.
His charts show how unique the U.S. is among its peers when it comes to the way the country handles guns.
The first chart shows gun deaths per capita graphed against gun ownership per capita. Notice the upward trend — the more guns per capita, the more gun deaths per capita. The US has the most guns, ergo it has one of the highest rates of gun deaths.
Digging a little deeper, Reid realized that the strangely high rankings of gun deaths in countries like Switzerland and Finland were due to high suicide rates. Additionally, one of the reasons the Swiss have such a high gun ownership is because of the country's mandatory male military service, after which the men may keep their guns.
When it comes to homicides and gun ownership rates, Mexico and the United States are each in a league of their own, with ownership rates and death rates that skew the axes of the entire chart. You can see a close-up of the countries that aren't the U.S. or Mexico on Reid's site.
Below is the chart that Reid made of strictly gun homicides:
Reid's final chart is also interesting. In order to find nations similar to the United States and Mexico on guns, you have to allow every country in the world into the data set, even ones with ongoing wars:
Click here to see the full story on Reid's analysis >