Rate Of U.S. Gun Violence Has Fallen Since 1993, Study Says

[jimmy the one]

40. have a cup of swiss myth

marblefalls: In both Israel and Switzerland anyone who serves in the armed forces.. also serves in the reserves after active duty and takes their personal weapons including assault weapons home.. I bet they are more armed than we in firepower per capita.

While on home guard duty, swiss soldiers are issued an assault rifle which they can keep after completing service, but ammo for the assault rifle is now kept in swiss armories not in the soldiers home (after service dunno). Swiss cannot carry concealed firearms without a valid reason, like a US 'may issue' state, & gunlicense required.
(BTW, dan did provide a link for his 'spread sheet', unedited, check again & apologize).

You say 'you bet' swiss & israel & canada are more armed than US? couldn't be more wrong, you are off by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude (in total, closer with rates).
Israel .. less than a million legal guns, maybe less than 100,000.
Switz: ~8 million people.. ~3 million guns .. ~1 gun per 3 people
USA: ~310 million people.. ~300 million guns.. near one gun per person.
In other words, the US has about 300 million more guns than Switz & Israel combined.

a good read for you, marblefalls: .. they don’t have high levels of gun ownership. The gun ownership in Israel and Switzerland has decreased. For instance, in Israel, they’re very limited in who is able to own a gun. There are only a few tens of thousands of legal guns in Israel, and the only people allowed to own them legally live in the settlements, do business in the settlements, or are in professions at risk of violence.
Both countries require you to have a reason to have a gun. There isn’t this idea that you have a right to a gun. You need a reason. And then you need to go back to the permitting authority every 6 months or so to assure them the reason is still valid.
The second thing is that there’s this widespread misunderstanding that Israel and Switzerland promote gun ownership. They don’t. Ten years ago, when Israel had the outbreak of violence, there was an expansion of gun ownership, but only to people above a certain rank in the military. There was no sense that having ordinary citizens [carry guns] would make anything safer.
In Israel, it used to be that all soldiers would take the guns home with them. Now {since 2006} they have to leave them on base.. there’s been a 60% decrease in suicide on weekends among IDS soldiers.
..Israel rejects 40% of its applications for a gun, the highest rate of rejection of any country in the world. And even when you get approved, you say that “all guns must have an Interior Ministry permit and identifying mark for tracing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/mythbusting-israel-and-switzerland-are-not-gun-toting-utopias/