The December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was the latest in a long line of school shootings. It reinforced an impression among many — both inside and outside the country — that the USA is a country blighted by violent crime, particularly gun crime. And as Figure 1 shows, the homicide rate in the USA is significantly in excess of any of its G8 partners. (There are more than 30 murders per head of the population in the USA for every one murder in the UK.)
The majority of homicides (68%) are gun crimes. Depending on how statistics are collected, there are somewhere between 24 and 30 gun murders in the USA every day. This is, perhaps, unsurprising given the level of gun ownership in the country. There are almost 90 guns privately held in the USA for every 100 people. This is almost double that of any other developed nation, and is more than 12 times the level of gun ownership in the UK.
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