Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Those aren't surprising. Well, Serbia, perhaps. Finland has a long culture as being a wooded wilderness and hardy, independent souls. Think Alaska. The Swiss military is heavily militia dependent. Yemen is just simply chaos.

I had read recently that Finland was 2nd in per-capita gun ownership, so I have to consider the numbers themselves dubious. But, in any review, the U.S. has always been tops.

The U.S. cultural fascination with weaponry is a multi-faceted thing, and reducing it to a 'snapshot' is simplistic and misleading at best. That's neither a promotion nor attack of the 2nd Amendment, just my own observation.

I'm not surprised, and I'm sure a lot of Americans DO own guns, but one thing you have to take into account is the strong culture of gun-collecting in America that doesn't, I think, have an equivalent in most other nations.

A hundred guys with 20 guns each is a different thing from 2000 people with guns. And really, it doesn't scare me if someone wants to own a couple dozen hunting rifles. Keeping the dangerous stuff off the streets is the real concern.

What percentage of US households own firearms?

I've come across a gallup poll that said 38% of households own guns - that seems low. I've also come across polls from "pro-gun" groups that show numbers closer to 60% - but the NRA is hardly an objective source.

Do we have a lot of people with a few guns in their homes, or a few people with a LOT of guns in their homes?

Interesting statistic, but that's boiling it down a bit too much. A lot of Americans who own a firearm own two or more. Collections in the dozens are not unusual. It also means a lot of specialty/relic firearms that are completely impractical for anything but recreation. Gun owners in less affluent countries mostly can't afford the luxury of a gun that they can't quickly load, use and fire, and tend to have fewer but more practical arms.

Gun owning households per 100 would be a much more telling statistic.

Arms, Not Guns

Militia-type military-political institutions -- e.g. in Switzerland or Finland -- do not necessarily have that many small-arms in private ownership. Non-deocrative or non-sport weapons are typically state-owned and strored in arsenals or kept in lockers of various sorts even at home. They are not for public display or private use.

Also, with real militia, since Roman times, arms and armor are highly standardized and reasonably modern, not cultish or sacramental objects, like turn-of-the-previous-century "1911" pistols or ".44" cartridges, save when incorporated into some official ceremony or monument.

Finally, the concept of "arms" is by no means reduced to just "guns". It includes things like cell-phones and internet protocol (Finland) as well as "mountain bikes" (Switzerland) -- anything "necessary for the security of a free state".

This contrasts with, say, privately-owned farm implements or aristocratic status-goods. Those are characteristic of a feudal (Anglo-Saxon) fryd -- not the same thing as a republican militia at all.

I think the Supreme Court of the United States, pandering to a legacies of the KKK and theories of the NRA, got practical, legal, and historical foundations of the militia upside down and backwards. The militia institution, for instance, has everything to do with suffrage and nothing to do with ownership of property, estates, titles, tithes, and so on.

Switzerland has a very long tradition of armed citizenry going back to the 14th Century. At one time, every able-bodied male citizen in Geneva was required to bear arms, and in most villages there was a store of pikes in someone's barn.

It is simplistic to whittle down the US, but it isn't to whittle the other countries down like Andy does?

Every Swiss male between 19 and 41 is in the military reserves and must keep an assault rifle and handgun loaded and ready in their home. Many Swiss continue this practice after leaving the reserves. Switzerland can really deploy an armed militia quickly and efficiently if a situation was ever created.

Posted by Bill Gottschall | November 25, 2008 8:14 PM

I guess this might also help explain Switzerland's unbelievably high suicide rate, as well

Please, Matt, describing Switzerland as having an "unbelievably high suicide rate" is nonsense. It's rate falls in the middle of the scale in comparison with most countries... and well below that of an unarmed nation, such as Japan. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate