Guns And Murders

 Those countries where general private gun own ownership is allowed, or even a constitutional right ... 

UN World Wide Murder Counts Per Region

... often argue that it deters crime, and allows citizens to defend themselves from criminals.

This, all despite all evidence to the contrary, that it often does exactly the opposite. For example:

• American Virgin Islands murder rate 49.6 per 100k
• British Virgin Islands murder rate 8.2 per 100k

The difference .... gun access in American Virgin Islands (which also impacts the British Virgin Islands murder rate as guns cross over). This difference in murder rates in related territories, suggests that gun access has a large and disproportionate impact on homicide rates, refuting any claims to the opposite.

But looking at the list, its also a fact, that when listed by nation, it indicates that ethnicity also appears to have an impact on murder rates (where guns are freely or easily available), as the list of countries with the top murder rates, are dominated by black majority countries or territories, and that black on black homicides often disproportionately impact murder rates in many non black majority countries. 

This observation is just a simple fact and not really subject to opinion as it can be demonstrated.

• Top murder hot spot at 76.59 per 100k is the Turks and Caicos. At 59,367, population and the third-largest of the British overseas territories by population ... however it's been self governing since 1976 (Demographics: 88% Black, 8% White, 4% Mixed or East Indian).

• Second is the aforementioned US Virgin Islands at 49.6 per 100k (Demographics: 71.4% Black or African American, 16.6% White, 7.5% Mixed Race).

• Third spot Jamaica with a murder rate at 49.3 per 100k (and in 2022 it was actually 53.34). Jamaica is of course independent since 1962 (Demographics: 91.4% black or mixed race, 3.4% Indian Mixed, 3.2% White).

In fact the only outlier ethnically in the top 10 spots is Ecuador at 45.72 per 100k (Demographics: 77.5% to 78% Mestizo, 7.7% Indigenous) .... this high homicide rate, is apparently driven by drug cartel gangs and corruption, with weak police enforcement. But its still a fact that 14 of the top 16 countries listed below are held by black/afro-caribbean majority nations ... Colombia is on 17th spot at 25.69 per 100k. 

Without a shadow of a doubt, the economic driver of many of the higher murder rates is drugs and the emergence of gangs and cartels to distribute them to the primary markets of the USA and Europe. But this doesn't detract from the fact that it takes a willingness to kill in order to engage in the drug trade, by many in a countries population, that actually creates the homicide rates in many of these countries. 

In fact after the 10th spot, you can seriously start seeing the results of the major drug cartels in South America, with Central and South American countries really entering the list. Surprisingly, Mexico, despite its description by the USA as Cartel central (along with Venezuela which has also been singled out), is not leading that group.

Intentional Homicide Rates Per 100k

For comparison the continental US (with general legal gun ownership) the murder rate is 5.763 per 100k, and the UK (with restricted legal gun ownership), is just 1.148 per 100k of population. Notably, American Samoa, with a nearly homogenous Samoan population of 45,443 people ... apparently has no murder rate (the same as the Vatican).

You can draw whatever conclusion you like from these facts .... I am just reporting them as an interesting observation, after uncovering them doing research for other recent posts on street gun crimes involving mass injured or killings, in certain areas of the USA, where there was some correlation with these figures.