Well I will eat my hat!
From NRA-ILA website (must be accurate, right?):
"The firearm accident death rate is*at an all-time annual low, 0.2 per 100,000 population, down 94% since the all-time high in 1904."
Meanwhile across the Pond...
Most recent murder rate UK = 1.28 per 100,000 pop (2009)
Actually until sometime in the seventies, I would have been right, but the gun accident rate has kept on dropping fast. Credit due to better gun design, improved safety awareness or stricter gun controls, take your pick.
Personally I do not believe that the level of crime in total is related to gun ownership - there are countries with high gun ownership levels and low crime rates (Switzerland), high guns + high crime (US), low guns + high crime (UK), and low guns +low crime (Japan?).
But the expression of crime in terms of gun related murder does seem to correlate with gun ownership - hence is my arms race argument, which is a classic prisoners' dilemma problem where the optimum solution can only be achieved through the use of an outside arbitrator, ie the state.
The overall crime rate is clearly a cultural matter: not primarily economic, as the left-liberals claim, although demographics and the business cycle clearly have an incremental effect.
Meanwhile the way in which yanks and limeys talk past each other on this issue is also cultural, and down to the different ways in which each views the role of the state.
Yanks, at least of the Red State variety, view liberty as something that is threatened by a strong state. With a weak state they feel free - to keep slaves, massacre red indians, invade Mexico etc
Guns are a totem of this freedom. Hence the rather silly arguments about how we are all doomed to end up under Nazi rule unless we have the right to bear arms. (Which ignores the fact that the Weimar republic fell because it did not control a monopoly of force, not because citizens were disempowered by gun laws).
For the British a strong centralized state has historically been the source of rights and freedoms. The main threat to liberty the individual faced was not from the sovereign, but from ruthless and greedy oligarchs, whether the traditional landed aristocracy or rapacious industrialists. The state, through the mechanisms of the Crown Courts, ameliorated the depredations of the locally powerful.
Indeed the recent riots in England can be seen as parallel to the American Revolution:
- A section of the population feels that it lives long way away from the centre of power.
- They believe that the forces of the state are biased against them and give them insufficient "respect".
- The state has been attempting to prevent them from victimizing other subjects (albeit with little success).
- When they are required to contribute to the finances of the state from which they have been major beneficiaries they claim they are over taxed and under represented.
- When some spark ignite the flames a few opportunists organize the rest through the social media of the day and start an insurrection.
- Rival militias form.
- While the forces of the crown struggle to reimpose order the politicians leap at an opportunity to settle old scores....
- Civil war?