As you probably know already, I am not a great gun fan. Like everyone else, I spend my lunchtimes sitting watching videos that already agree with my point of view. Because, y’know, otherwise how would you learn anything? Anyway – one of the things that is often cited by people on my side of the debate is the vast number of gun deaths in America compared to other civilised countries. And, sure enough, there they are on the list, right up there with all the places you’d not like to live. But I think this is a kind of meaningless statistic – of course hardly anyone in the UK is killed with a gun. There aren’t any guns there. There are very few snowmobile-related deaths in Afghanistan.

I would assume that, every hour, about the same volume of the population in America and the UK decide “Right. That does it. I’m going to do that twat some serious damage”. Then, with the finest murder weapon they can get their hands on, off they trot. Americans obviously have it comparatively easy as they can either use one of their own guns or pop to the supermarket and buy an AK-47. But us Brits are resourceful souls. We could run someone over with the car, or throw a waffle iron into their bath, or push them out of their bathroom window. How hard can it be?

Instead of comparing firearm murder rates, what we really want to compare is any-old-weapon murder rates. And, actually, Americans do way better on that list. They have 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people – this compared to a world average of 6.9. They’re still behind most of the places I’d like to live (UK 1.2; France 1.1; China 1.0; Switzerland 0.7) but they’re ahead of some surprising locations (Russia 10.2; Saint Lucia 25!). So perhaps it’s not such a bad spot after all.

Another thing to think about is the fact that a gun is probably a more sure fire murder weapon (ha, ha) than whatever the angry but resourceful Brit might have come up with. So presumably America has a higher successful-murder rate but Britain will have higher rates of other injuries. There aren’t so many clear numbers on this, but the Wikipedia page about American crime has a section devoted to comparisons. Summary: probably not.

Of course, there are probably quite a few murderers in the UK who run out of steam while trying to find a murder weapon, or their weapon of choice fails entirely to injure the person they were after. I’ve no statistics on that. Hopefully they got it worked out some other way. Maybe it’s for the best.