The school shooting in Newtown Friday has reignited the debate about gun control, so it's worth noting just how widespread guns are in this country. The Washington Post (by way of a Guardian story in the wake of the Aurora shooting) is drawing attention to this statistic from the 2007 Small Arms Survey: The U.S. has an average 88.8 guns per 100 people, the highest gun-ownership rate in the world.

Also at the Post Ezra Klein points to Kieran Healy's graph, which shows that while the United States is more violent than other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the violence in the country is dropping. Graphs from Simon Rogers at the Guardian, reveal that the U.S. does have a lesser homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 population than countries including Honduras, El Salvador, and Jamaica.  

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Esther Zuckerman