If more guns=safer citizens, the US should be the safest country in the world.
In many respects the US is the safest country in the world.
It has been over 120 years (1890) since the last major Indian slaughter in this nation. Since then, the largest government slaughter of civilians which I can recall off the top of my head would be the Waco slaughter of the Branch Davidians in the 1990s. (The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was relatively peaceful with overt attempts to slaughter anyone.) Compare this to the Nazi, Soviet, Chinese, Japanese, and Rwanda (1994, 800,000 victims) genocides and slaughters of the 20th century.
I think we go back to the war of 1812 since we were last successfully invaded by an organized military force. (We'll ignore the invited mass invasion of illegal aliens.)
The US has a lower total violent crime rate than many other first world nations including England; though apples-to-apples comparisons are hard to come by. And if you look outside our major urban areas (almost always controlled by liberals with lots of gun laws), our violent crime rates are even lower. The
violent crime rate in Utah is about 220 per 100,000 (and that is driven by a couple of urban cities), while our stereotypically polite and law abiding
Canadian neighbors have a violent crime rate of almost 2,000 per 100,000. To compare apples-to-apples, Utah's murder rate is 2.3 per 100,000 while Canada's is 1.56. Canada has about 80% of its population living in urban areas, Utah has 90% of our population in urban areas.
Strong State Preemption means that our rare, liberal-controlled cities can't enforce gun control.
As reported on the
US Census site, Maryland has a violent crime rate of 679 per 100,000 residents, while Virginia's rate is only 282.
Are you suggesting that privately owned firearms do not increase personal nor social safety?
Charles