Guns make you safer? Check the evidence.

Last night I watched Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore’s award-winning film about U.S. gun culture. It was released in 2002 in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre.

In this intensely disturbing program, the comment that jumped out at me was this one by a Canadian being interviewed:

If more guns make people safer, then America would be one of the safest countries. It isn’t. It’s the opposite.

A study by two New York City cardiologists found that the U.S. has 88 guns per 100 people and 10 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people — more than any of the other 27 developed countries they studied.

What did they conclude?

The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death in a given country.

 Study details

(Drs. Sripal Bangalore, who works at NYU Langone Medical Center,  and Dr. Franz Messerli of St. Luke’s Medical Center studied the statistics of guns per capita and gun deaths. They used firearm injury data from the World Health Organization and guns per capita data from the Small Arms Survey to put together a list of 27 developed countries.

Here’s a link to the study: http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00444-0/abstract)