If decreasing the number of legally owned guns is supposed to help prevent crime, it’s not working in Europe. Many developed nations with high rates of gun ownership have murder rates that are actually lower than many developed nations where gun ownership is much more rare. For example, as Table 1 shows, the murder rate in Luxembourg, where handguns are banned and ownership of any type of gun is almost nil, was about nine times higher than Germany.
So what causes the violence? A 2007 Harvard study titled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?” published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy says that “the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism.”
Is Gun Control Helping or Hurting Europe?
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