18 Little-Known Gun Facts That Prove That Guns Make Us Safer

#1 Over the past 20 years, gun sales have absolutely exploded, but homicides with firearms are down 39 percent during that time and “other crimes with firearms” are down 69 percent.

#2 A study published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy discovered that nations that have more guns tend to have less crime.

#3 The nine European nations with the lowest rate of gun ownership rate have a combined murder rate that is three times greater than the nine European nation with the highest rate of gun ownership.

#4 Almost every mass shooting that has occurred in the United States since 1950 has taken place in a state with strict gun control laws…

With just one exception, every public mass shooting in the USA since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are banned from carrying guns. Despite strict gun regulations, Europe has had three of the worst six school shootings.

#5 The United States is #1 in the world in gun ownership, and yet it is only 28th in the world in gun murders per 100,000 people.

#6 The violent crime rate in the United States actually fell from 757.7 per 100,000 in 1992 to 386.3 per 100,000 in 2011.  During that same time period, the murder rate fell from 9.3 per 100,000 to 4.7 per 100,000.

#7 Approximately 200,000 women in the United States use guns to protect themselves against sexual crime every single year.

#8 Overall, guns in the United States are used 80 times more often to prevent crime than they are to take lives.

#9 The number of unintentional fatalities due to firearms declined by 58 percent between 1991 and 2011.

#10 Despite the very strict ban on guns in the UK, the overall rate of violent crime in the UK is about 4 times higher than it is in the United States.  In one recent year, there were 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people in the UK.  In the United States, there were only 466 violent crimes per 100,000 people during that same year.  Do we really want to be more like the UK?

#11 The UK has approximately 125 percent more rape victims per 100,000 people each year than the United States does.

#12 The UK has approximately 133 percent more assault victims per 100,000 people each year than the United States does.

#13 The UK has the fourth highest burglary rate in the EU.

#14 The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.

#15 Down in Australia, gun murders increased by about 19 percent and armed robberies increased by about 69 percent after a gun ban was instituted.

#16 The city of Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the United States.  So has this reduced crime?  Of course not.  As I wrote about recently, the murder rate in Chicago was about 17 percent higher in 2012 than it was in 2011, and Chicago is now considered to be “the deadliest global city“.  If you can believe it, there were about as many murders in Chicago during 2012 as there was in the entire nation of Japan.

#17 After the city of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring every home to have a gun, the crime rate dropped by more than 50 percent over the course of the next 23 years and there was an89% decline in burglaries.

#18 According to Gun Owners of America, the governments of the world slaughtered more than 170 million of their own people during the 20th century.  The vast majority of those people had been disarmed by their own governments prior to being slaughtered.