And sorry to pursue you here away from Roger Ebert’s web site, but I am really curious as to how you got your data that gun control doesn’t work, and Roger’s site seems to not be accepting this post.

Here is the required data.
http://bit.ly/WBA6lc
You can play with the data all you want; I hope you are comfortable with spreadsheets.

The US has the highest rate of gun ownership in the World: 88 per 100 people. It is almost twice that of the nearest country, Switzerland, at 45 per 100 people. The United States also has one of the highest rates of gun use for homicide; 60% of homicides are done with guns. The only significant countries with higher rates are Columbia, Venezuela, Brazil, Switzerland and Italy.

The correlation between a high rate of gun ownership and a high rate of gun death is almost perfect, with the glaring exceptions of Norway and France. Those countries have a lot of guns, but low death rates: How come?

Let’s look at the details: The gun control laws in Norway are a liberal’s dream, restrictive, severe and enforced: Wikipedia describes them extensively. Gun control laws in France are also quite strict, for example limiting semi- automatic weapons to fixed magazines with a maximum of three rounds (you’ll have to translate the Wikipedia article, ‘Contrôle des armes à feu en France’, though for the exact details, there is no English page).
The homicide rate in these two countries are the lowest in the world, along with Japan, where gun ownership is practically 0.

So the numbers show that there are two ways of reducing gun homicides: banning guns entirely, as in Japan and England, or gun control, as in Norway and France and the rest of Europe.

Americans are a very well disciplined people, in a well regulated country: the overall homicide rate is average, if a bit high, despite the tremendous opportunities offered by all those guns. Still, the homicide rate is 4 times the one of Canada. Can it really be a coincidence that gun ownership is also almost three times higher?

There. No hyperboles, no fallacies, just numbers. Gun control, strictly applied and enforced, works. It saves lives. Without banning hunting rifles or most types of handguns. Without revoking the second amendment.

If you, or any other reader, can deduce different conclusions from the numbers I present, I’d be fascinated to see your arguments.

I have to say that I agree totally that the fundamental problem is not guns, it is social inequality.

Regards,

Michel Lamontagne
Otterburn Park
Canada