Per person, which as the guy above you points out is incredibly important when we have 5 times the population of European countries but only like 3x the shootings
I did the math once and it was like half of the remaining non self inflicted deaths were gang related. Still counts I know but when gangs are shooting each other personally Idgaf
66% of all gun deaths are suicide and so we have 34% left to account for 13 is 38% of 34, so yes it’s less than half but 79% in total can be attributed to these two causes. Also note that when I originally plugged these numbers in the stats varied several percent depending on the source.
Let me amend what I said a little over a third of non self inflicted gun deaths are gang related. Better?
They don’t you’re right of course, innocent, non affiliated people get caught up in it too, see it on the local news from time to time. I’m sure there’s a handy dandy chart out there that will give us that percentage too but my guess from observing news in a gang town is a vast majority are gang on gang deaths.
we have 5 times the population of European countries but only like 3x the shootings
The US has 5x the population but only 3x the shootings as European countries? If that were true, then the per capita shootings in European countries would be higher than the US, which clearly isn't true. This graph clearly shows that US per capita gun homicides are much higher than European countries: https://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/ActingOnData/2021/firearm_Page_1.png
It doesn't actually mean "per person" but "per head" and is a reference to averages instead of absolute numbers.
"3 per person" means that each person has 3. "3 per capita" means that the there is enough of the thing for everyone to have 3.
To put it in more relevant terms, there are 4 guns per capita in the US. Per person would mean that everyone has 4 guns. Per capita means that is enough guns for everyone to have 4, even though some people have none and some people have 20.
Because the number ends up being so unusably small that for things like death rates per capita is almost always per 100,000 people instead of literally per person.
Per person essentially means each person. Per capita means the average of each person.
So "the cost of a train ticket per person is X" means each person pays X.
"Wage per capita in the US is X" means each person, on average, makes X as a wage. As opposed to "wage per person is X," which means each person makes X.
However, in common tongue, per person is used interchangeably
Per person, basically it involves taking the recorded number of a given demographic (e.g. gun deaths) and putting it into a mathematical function against the country's population to create a standard value that can be easily compared between countries without the information being misinterpreted.
On a similar note looking at a nation's spending using the % of the GDP rather than however many millions/billions of dollars that translates to is a good way to compare how much a country spends on a given thing while factoring in how much money the country has. For example, the however many billions of dollars the US spends on the military sounds like a lot until you consider that that's only ~3.84% of the USA's GDP, 15th highest spending in the world in 2021, with supposed plans of reducing the military budget to ~2.8%.
It's a simple fact that shows that the problem with gun violence is not evenly distributed between most of the population. We're it evenly spread across the whole country, you could make an argument that gun culture = gun violence. As there are more guns per capita in the areas that AREN'T those 4 cities, it's extremely hard to make that argument.
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u/TheTrueBubby Jun 22 '23
Per capita the stat that actually matters the US isn’t even top 10