Homicides by firearm

After the renewed political focus on gun control, a few graphs and charts flew around the Internet. In the new era of social media, quickly prepared data is quickly disseminated. Especially for recycled information that was immediately available. However, almost as quickly, the people challenge the information as presented and doubt the source of the data. With the national media and political focus involved, ample noise on both sides of the issue come out to clutter the dialogue. One area of interest seems to be whether the United States of America is different in regards to gun control than other developed nations. One chart plots the gun deaths by developed nation with the US easily ahead. Others claim the violent crime rate is higher per capita in other places.

I set out for global data from hopefully an objective source. The United Nations posts "homicides by firearms" available on its Office on Drugs and Crime website. All data lists the source (national departments) and there are gaps. 2009 seemed the most recent year with the most data. Either recognized warfare is excluded or war-torn countries are not able to report data, as Afghanistan and Iraq are noticeably missing in the data set. Other glaring omissions include China and Iran - rather than speculate why these nations are not represented in any of the data, using the data available still represents insights. For 2009 data, countries that did not yet report data included: Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Uruguay, Viet Nam, and Zimbabwe. In short, the countries with data do represent about half of the global population and more than an adequate proxy for regional data comparisons. Plotting the number of homicides as bar charts against left axis and homicides per 100,000 as dots plotted against the right axis, the graph places the western hemisphere on a different plane than the rest of the planet:

Drilling down to the sub-regions places all of the western hemisphere out of scope with the rest of the sub-regions on the other continents:

Regardless of what the so-called drug control laws are across the globe the homicides by firearms in the western hemisphere point to something, perhaps the illegal drug trade is to blame.

Looking at national data misses the many countries not represented and gets into some of the nuances of how individual countries track information. Nevertheless, rating high means something. 
The plot of over 50 countries was not very legible, so cutting the list down to the nations with over 10 million citizens is a bit more legible:

The third bar is the US, with the third most homicides by firearms among the nations represented. The handful of nations within that level include Columbia and Venezuela (both had armed conflicts in 2009, so the line between homicide and casualties of war may factor into the data), Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. India has a large number of homicides but only in scale as the per capita rate is as low as the other countries with nominal levels. While comparisons to some elite economic powerhouses is not available (China, Russia, and Brazil), the United States is clearly out of line from Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Again, looking only at that level of information ignores what seems a pervasive geographic difference between the continents. Between Canada and Mexico, the US looks more like Mexico than Canada:

While it is extraordinarily tempting to attribute the Canadian level to differences in that nation, perhaps and more likely explanation is the drug trafficking coming from south of the border and terminating in the illegal drug trade in the US is the root cause of the firearm homicide rates in the US and Mexico. If so, perhaps the entire notion of gun control is misdirecting focus away from the underlying problems inherent in the illegal drug trade. While mass shootings are horrible, diving into the data of firearm homicides demonstrates a larger and potential more impacting issue needing more attention in the United States. Most likely the thousands of shooting deaths did not come from machine guns, yet the mass shootings cause Congress to target automatic weaponry. Perhaps the use of the politics of gun control will put into place some improvements for hand guns that are far more likely to cause homicides, or perhaps Congress will follow the lead of the media and enact legislation that miss the mark, either way the circumstances warrants attention.