What is there in Iceland to shoot? I have been there and saw very few animals, let alone wild animals, but yet you have more guns in the UK where we have lots of foxes, rabbits, and loads of game birds.
Same in Sweden and they need to be kept in a specific locked cabinet in your house. If you are found to have weapons lying around in an unsafe manner it's a prison sentence for you buddy boy!
Almost the same in Denmark. All the guns are supposed to be kept no more than 1 km from Øresund though. This is so everyone living in that area is near a gun when the Swedes invade.
In Romania you need to have the gun in safe, unloaded, and any ammo has to be in a separate safe. This was introduced under communism because people would use their hunting rifles for home defense when secret police showed up at night to make them disappear. The new law would then ensure that if you abide by it, you have no chance of loading your weapon when they break into your house. Also, owning any gun automatically gives police the right to go into your house without warrant at any time to check if your gun is properly stored in the safe.
Ehh, I never quite buy that completely.
US for example. Perfectly legal to own a gun for home defence in most states... But practically, anyone who pulls a gun on police is going to get shot, and those odds go way way up if you're not white. If guns were a deterrent to tyranny, police wouldn't be brutalizing black and Hispanic communities. Watch how quickly the police and media are to claim a black police shooting victim had a gun with no mention of whether the gun was legal.
Not saying I'm fully against gun ownership, or that there aren't occasions where it might be okay to use it in self defense. More that a better way to fight tyranny is to disarm the tyrants.
Guns are a deterrent for tyranny, but the founding fathers never knew that the US would end up with what amounts to an occupation army (the police) being in charge of law enforcement.
Police didn't even exist in the US until the 1830s!
It’s similar in Finland as well. With proper management in training, licensing and registration, gun ownership should be a choice. Some people have a lot of trouble disentangling guns from crime and mental health problems because they only look at the US as the reference.
For the record, I am saying all this as someone who doesn’t own a gun and neither am I planning to get one in the near future.
I guess that most of these are hunting rifles and that the average hunter owns much more than a single one, because there is no way 30% of the population are hunters.
Instead of dividing the number of legally owned guns by the population, they should try to make a statistic for households that have at least one gun - this is the real one that matters.
Handguns are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun violence roughly 90%. That being said restrictions on handguns are much less popular than restrictions on rifles, despite rifles killing fewer people.
Because the whole gun debate in the US is fought on ideology rather than facts—on both sides. A lot of people on the gun control side simply don’t know that much about guns and believe that rifles are just always more powerful and more dangerous in every situation. They don’t realize that handguns can even be the superior weapon when shooting at a closer range.
Yep, gun ownership seems to be roughly 30% in the us (and it’s more like 85% in some areas and 15% in others) but those who do own guns either have 1 or several dozen. As such there are reportedly more guns than people in the us.
Hard to get concrete numbers though as the us more or less bars tracking them in any meaningful way
42% of adults in the US lived in a houselhold that had a gun in it, in 2017. [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns/)
Phone survey, so 42% of adults who are willing to say "Yes, I own a gun" to a stranger on the phone.
As a reference, in Sweden, we have about 600k gun owners. Unsure what the adult to non-adult ratio is exactly, but let's say 7-8% of households has a gun in it.
We don't have a limit of 4... it's 6 for hunters. Sport shooters has no such limit.
We have a storage limitation that says 20 "points" for a normal gun cabinet else you need a grade 3 safe if you want more than that. A long gun is 1 point, a handgun is 2 points. Full auto (rare to get) is 4 points.
When did you do it? Pretty sure it's been 6 for quite some time. They will ask why you need gun 5 and 6 though (for hunting) but it's not like it's hard to answer them something. They don't really seem to care as long as you reply with something, e.g. gun 5 is for fox hunting, gun 6 is for birds.
Last year. But I am also a German hunter and I am bringing max 2 rifles with me (klass 1 and hagelgevär). Studying for the Jägarexamen was online, i think if i attended a class or something they would have explained it more thoroughly. Lucky me I guess.
And I think the Swedish system is better. I know hunters in Germany with 50+ weapons.
German exam tests you on more and deeper content. And there is a third part of the exam where you need to go 5 different panels and answer verbally to random questions, walk through a part of the forest and name all the plants, determine the age of an animal based on its jaw bones/teeth etc.
I found the Swedish shooting exam more challenging, though.
Keep in mind many firearm owners will have multiple guns, whether for target shooting or hunting. The latter because different game requires different tools.
In Germany there are approximately 1 million firearm owners, so about 1 in 80 people. Mindful much of Germany (geographically) is rural, and how firearms are regularly a part of agricultural life, that’s not surprising.
Certain kinds of guns are unlikely to be used in crimes. Namely, semiautomatic long guns and shotguns. Which also happen to be the most useful guns for hunting and ranching applications and are the kinds of guns that are most common in rural areas where they are used as tools, like in Scandinavia. The real gun problem in the U.S. is with handguns, but it’s an issue that’s rarely discussed because neither side of the issue wants to engage in that level of nuance.
Have any statistics on that? I’m sure handgun crime in general is a lot lower in Vermont than in the rest of the country, as it would probably be in any place with an aging population and no city. But I’d still be willing to be that most robberies and murders are done with handguns and that any given handgun is much more likely to be used in a crime than, say, a 12 gauge or even a so-called “assault rifle.”
60% of the murders in Michigan happen in the city of Detroit, which makes up less than 8% of the state's population and all Michiganders have the same access to guns and are subject to the same state and federal gun laws.
Guns are not and have never been the problem, if they were, then the murder rate would be more or less equal throughout the state.
You’re drawing too much of a conclusion from that correlation. We actually can’t draw the conclusion you want to reach without access to information like the actual distribution of guns across different geographies within Michigan, different types of guns that are used in crimes across those geographies, and the correlation between changes in gun availability and crimes with other variables isolated. Instead, what your comparison shows is that 1) gun availability is very unlikely to be the *only* thing driving murder rates; and 2) uniform gun laws across a large area do not result in a uniform distribution of murder rates, which means that gun laws are demonstrably not the only thing that drives murder rates. Those are pretty uncontroversial conclusions.
The whole problem with the gun debate is that, by design from ideologues on both sides of this issue, we don’t have good statistics about how much an incremental increase in gun availability causes an incremental increase in different types of crime. It’s absurd to argue that there is no correlation at all, but it’s possible that the correlation isn’t very strong, that other factors are overwhelmingly more significant, and that gun laws have a minimal impact on crime. We just don’t know. I wish we had that info, because we could make much smarter decisions about how to actually reduce crime.
you forgot to say that there huge % of society that is not mentally healthy and will use guns to harm others, so at the end of the day culture does not mean nothing.
Why? Scandinavia is sparsely populated and theres lot of hunters its big part of culture and finland has conscription too and eternal threat from east.
Also Austria is surprisingly far up.
Getting a gun here is surprisingly easy. I went to civil service so im still prohibited from carrying but ill mabye buy one if i can forbthe lulz
You can still get Category C after refusing military service, just not Cat B. If you have a proper reason (sports shooting or hunting), also B can be given after civil service.
https://www.euroshooters.at/zivildiener/
Because it's bull. In France you need a permit to get a gun, so about 5,4 million guns are accounted. Even if you double because of illegal guns (which can't be that much), it's less than 20/100 (and more likely around 10/100). Even if it really were 30 guns for 100 people, we would be nowhere at the same level as Switzerland where it's mandatory to have a gun for national defense.
Same. I'm from germany and I've never seen a gun in real life(except holstered guns of police officers).
But according to this map, 30-50% of people have one.
I'm Norwegian. I own a shotgun, and two rifles.
Two are for hunting (Silver Pidgeon and K98), one for shooting range due to the muzzle velocity not being allowed for hunting anymore (Kragh Jørgensen)
There's a difference between OWNING a gun and running around with loaded guns in public in the middle of town.
You want to do the latter in Germany, you better have a damn good reason for it, such as being a jeweler who regularly has to transport high value merchandise and thus has a significantly higher risk at being robbed than your average Joe. On the other hand, having an unloaded gun in a safe at home and transporting it, unloaded, to the range, where you're a registered member of the club, is just as fine as being a licensed hunter and having an unloaded rifle at home in the safe or in a locked case in your trunk.
Germany is just plain wrong.
83 Mio inhabitants and about 5 Mio guns in total for private persons.
That comes up to about one weapon for every 17 inhabitants. Get that to 100 inhabitants and you get about 5.8. so nowhere near the 70+ claimed in the map.
This sub’s gone to shite.
Ripped Wikipedia* content that’s just basal, monothematic and single dimension data plopped on a map.
“MapPorn”? MapBigWBasics.
You're right. Data sources are rarely provided, and I'd guess that's intentional. It's beyond easy to incite a response simply by throwing together a simple visualization, like a map. Most humans are lemmings.
I mean, I am sure our (italian) mafias also have a few guns and I doubt they are registered
Edit: looked it up and apparently we have 1.5 million registered firearms and 6.6 M unregistered ones lol
https://www.corriere.it/politica/24_gennaio_04/italia-8-milioni-armi-usa-dimostrano-non-ci-renderanno-piu-sicuri-2c157b22-aad1-11ee-97df-1dec2b8b830c.shtml
Half of the population lives in a big city, the rest is spread around the country, lots of rural areas driving the gun ownership per capita up, I was raised in a small town and there were like a gun, a rifle a shotgun and an air pellet rifle I used to play with as a kid, I remember my parents just telling to me, you may use the pellet rifle, not the others, which Is kinda wild now I think about it, but I always obeyed.
The map scale really kind of hides the numbers for the US. There are over 100 privately-owned firearms per 100 people in the US, and that's not considering guns in use for law enforcement and military.
It'd be like color coding the countries by population and make a top category of "over 500,000" for China and india.
This is an interesting map. One of the ideas you often hear in pro-gun circles is that places like Europe and Australia are so restrictive that they make it impossible for law-abiding citizens to own guns. But assuming that the dataset used to create this may is accurate, that clearly isn't true.
Can't speak entirely for other countries but in New Zealand people tend to either own no guns or several. Maybe something like a shotgun a .22LR and a .270.
This is actually the same in the US. There are more guns than people in the US, but less than 50% of Americans own a gun ([1](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/), [2](https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx), [3](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/)). The numbers vary but its often down towards 40%\~ of Americans owning a gun.
And If you dig into it more, its not that every gun owner in America has 3 guns. Its typically that most Americans do not own a gun, most American gun owners own only 1 gun, then there's that smaller group that owns 20 guns each.
Its funny that this applies to my family as well. There are 12 people in my family. 4 people are gun owners with a total of 33 guns.
3 people have 1 gun each. 1 person owns 30 (probably more than that)
Percentage of people who own guns in American will always be reported lower than it really is. It’s a BIG thing in the gun community not to let the government know you have guns.
If we assume that this map is accurate, you’re not reaching the right conclusion in my opinion. The data, atleast from the study that generated this chart, doesn’t support the conclusion here.
The chart came from the 2017 Small Arms Survey. According to that study, the US’s number of civilian owned guns per capita is 120.
The higher European per capita is Serbia at 39.
Australia is 14.5.
It's not even particularly difficult to own a gun in most European countries. You generally need a reason, but this can be as simple as being a member of a shooting club or a hunter or farmer. A couple countries (like Czechia) even allow self-defense as a reason.
The biggest reason there are fewer gun owners is that fewer people care to own them in the first place.
Personal ownership of firearms, including semi-automatic rifles, is not particularly difficult at all in Switzerland. Storing ammo (securely) in a residence is also perfectly legal in Switzerland.
A reservists’ issued service rifle has certain stipulations attached to it and any issued ammo must be kept in a sealed container outside of official use or emergencies but that’s not so for personally owned rifles and ammo.
>any issued ammo must be kept in a sealed container outside of official use or emergencies
Taschenmunition (issued ammo to keep at home in case of war) stopped being issued in 2007.
You can get your own ammo privately though.
Police station? What? Ammo is stored at one's military assembly point, not a civilian police station. Also, one can but ammunition privately, so it isn't like most Swiss army issued soldiers have NO access to ammunition. The Swiss post will deliver it to your door from an online order to a sporting goods or gun store.
This gets repeated on reddit frequently and is not true. Years ago they had a requirement to store a sealed box at home. That's no longer required and also you could buy all the other ammo you want.
Stop trying to make Europe a gun laws sound like American guns laws, they simply are not similar. Many American states have permit less open carry, for example. You guys are lying to support gun manufacturers and murder.
Actually most Swiss men don't serve in the army, the wide majority of the population doesn't either
But yes, you have the possibility of keeping your issued gun at home during service (there's less than 150k military-issued guns at the same time VS up to 4.5mio civilian-owned guns)
In the UK, guns are owned by framers, hunters and sport shooting. Farmers being by far the biggest group. Most of these groups are likely to own more than one gun.
No. Im an Australian. You just do a half day course to get a licence and then its sent to you in a few months and you can get a gun.
All you have to do is pass a test with things like do you point guns at people if its not loaded. Do you keep your gun locked in a safe or loaded on the kitchen cabinet. Then you go to the shooting range and as long as you dont point it at anyone youll pass.
What is more restrictive is the type of guns. If you want a semi youre going to have to be a licensed and professional hunter working in regional areas and even thats pretty hard. But if you just want a 22 its pretty easy.
Ill add guns and the cost of keeping them is more as well. So youll need the licence, join a shooting range as a member (or own/have permission to use a large farm), have a safe and then buy the gun and ammo which are way more expensive than the states. So you probably need to be middle class to afford it.
Italian here. Italy has some of the most permissive gun laws in Europe, and it is fairly easy to get a license for a hunting or sporting weapon. And it is also quite easy to have the right to possess a weapon IN THE HOUSE. Basically you have to go to the police station, prove that you are not a drug addict or an alcoholic, and you have a license.
What is very limited, on the other hand, is to carry a gun around. "Free carry" is almost impossible to get unless you are law enforcement or you do a job that is considered an armed assault risk such as security guard or night watchman. If you have a hunting license you can have a weapon in your car only in hunting season and on the way to the woods, if you have a sporting license you have to explicitly state "I live at the address...I shoot at the address..." and if you are caught with your sporting rifle not on the road between the two the weapon is seized.
I think that's the main difference with American states, where instead you often have the right to carry your weapon with you wherever you go.
I was wondering who was making up for me not owning a gun. I live in NJ and only 9% of the population own a guy. I'm in a rural part of NJ and during COVID lock down I realized I was the only one in my area without a gun as all my neighbors set up makeshift target ranges on their properties to shoot, to pass the time since everything else was shut down.
Years ago I remember a person had to be at least 300 feet away from the nearest building, road, etc., to legally discharge a firearm in my state, whether it be for hunting or target practice. Of course, a careless person could still strike somebody since a bullet can travel well over 300 feet. I just looked it up and found out each municipality has their own rules. Some towns the rule is 450 feet but in my town it’s only 200 feet. The last time I heard about somebody getting struck accidentally was when a hunter got injured by buckshot from another at a public park 20+ years ago.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated\_number\_of\_civilian\_guns\_per\_capita\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country)
The fidelity of the map is not great.
Not counting territories, there is 1 entry in the 75+ segment, 1 entry in the 50-75 segment, and 10 entries in the 30-50 segment.
The rest of the world is in the other segments. Should probably have kept 10-30 in segments of 5.
I feel that the lack of guns there has more to do with the east asian weak gun culture, than their authoritarian government. If you see the other east asian countries you will see that their gun ownership is low aswell
America has too many guns. But what a lot of people, even in Americans don’t realize is that a little less than half of Americans own a gun. It’s just that gun owners tend to have on average 2-3 guns so we end up with more guns than people. I for example am an American from a medium sized east coast city I don’t know anyone who owns a gun here. Where I go on vacation in the mountains of Pennsylvania everyone owns a gun.
Wow, one of the interesting consequences of this is it would probably be really hard to occupy the US. The occupiers would basically constantly be shot at from every window.
That's what americans keep saying to themselves and why gun enjoyers have so many guns: fictional scenarios.
The USA are impossible to occupy for multiple reasons. Very large territory with vast swaths of nothingness is the main one. There's just no army in the world (even the US army) that could actively occupy that the US. And it has very little to do with gun ownership.
Dont forget the two giant oceans and massive coastlines on either side. Invading the US isn't really an easy thing to do, even if we didn't have a massive military, nukes, and guns lying around all over the place, it would still take a tremendous amount of time and effort just to take even a single state, enough to exhaust any nation and make it not worth it. Full colonization took hundreds of years, and the effort of several empires.
It’s just a sales ploy. “Buy our product so you can defend your country! Be a patriot!”
Americans eat that shit up. Meanwhile the people that actually defend the country (soldiers) have gun/ammo restrictions and mandatory training.
There's a quote attributed to Admiral Yamamoto of Japan during WW2 that states "We could never invade America, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass". To this day it's still heavily debated as to whether or not Yamamoto actually made this statement, but it is fairly sound logic.
Well plenty of middle eastern countries, US has occupied are like this. Easier to acquire gun than beer. They still get rolled over.
Assuming a foreign military power can roll over US military, it can easily occupy most of the US. The civilians might have guns but if the opposition has attack helicopters, armored vehicles, tanks, artillery, mortars, missiles. I dont think a gun would make much a difference.
You mean the middle eastern countries that the US had to pull out of because their armed militia/terrorist groups were able to wage a successful guerrilla war? Thats a poor example for your point, especially since there are examples of your point being correct, and you chose an incorrect one.
You mean the guerilla groups that got their asses blasted over and had to hide in mountains till it was no longer economical feasible for american occupation.
The casualty rates for US were one of the lowest, they ran successful occupation till they decided to pull out. Every single one of them whether it be Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
The US is excellent at occupation, however it is pathetic in building functioning and competent government or military.
It’s funny because here in the USA if your a legal gun owner you can straight up build your own gun, you simply buy the parts online, they show up to your door and you assemble it
I'm unaware of political scenarios of US but can anyone here inform me why US has so many guns per capita? What are its possible implications in their society?
It’s worth noting that it’s not evenly distributed. Something like 1/3 of Americans own guns but there are more guns than people in the US. That’s largely because of a smaller percentage of gun enthusiasts with a LOT of guns.
My FIL for example had about 60 and that’s not considered particularly a lot in some circles.
It didn't happen until social media and a perfect marketing strategy took over. Nobody owned an AR 15 before that basically. NRA helps drive the fear which makes gun companies endless money.
This map is deceptive. America has twice as many guns per person than any other country. This color scale hides the details rather than illuminating them. Either propaganda or bad map making.
France, Germany and Scandinavia darker than I would have expected.
In Norway at least, a lot of people go hunting, and the vast majority of the shooting weapons in the country will be hunting rifles.
Same in Iceland, but shotguns are more popular.
What is there in Iceland to shoot? I have been there and saw very few animals, let alone wild animals, but yet you have more guns in the UK where we have lots of foxes, rabbits, and loads of game birds.
Geese, ptarmigan, puffin, various other seabirds, reindeer, foxes, and mink.
Don’t forget volcanos!
The British prefer melee damage
Same in Finland. Virtually only for hunting.
Depends. I have none for hunting, all are for sra
What’s SRA? Socialist Rifle Association?
Reservist practice
Hunting neighbors?
Only if they paint a Z on their car.
Bear protection too.
Hunting Russians?
Same in Sweden and they need to be kept in a specific locked cabinet in your house. If you are found to have weapons lying around in an unsafe manner it's a prison sentence for you buddy boy!
Almost the same in Denmark. All the guns are supposed to be kept no more than 1 km from Øresund though. This is so everyone living in that area is near a gun when the Swedes invade.
Ah I see you have prepared for the next time the strait freezes. Wouldn't want a repeat, would we? 👀
Denmark is secretly pushing for more global warming for this very reason.
I *knew* it!
I hear they ride moose into battle, be careful.
In Romania you need to have the gun in safe, unloaded, and any ammo has to be in a separate safe. This was introduced under communism because people would use their hunting rifles for home defense when secret police showed up at night to make them disappear. The new law would then ensure that if you abide by it, you have no chance of loading your weapon when they break into your house. Also, owning any gun automatically gives police the right to go into your house without warrant at any time to check if your gun is properly stored in the safe.
I'd be very curious to see a map of Europe where police have the right to go into your house without a warrant, to check for guns.
Almost like guns are a deterrent to tyranny...
Ehh, I never quite buy that completely. US for example. Perfectly legal to own a gun for home defence in most states... But practically, anyone who pulls a gun on police is going to get shot, and those odds go way way up if you're not white. If guns were a deterrent to tyranny, police wouldn't be brutalizing black and Hispanic communities. Watch how quickly the police and media are to claim a black police shooting victim had a gun with no mention of whether the gun was legal. Not saying I'm fully against gun ownership, or that there aren't occasions where it might be okay to use it in self defense. More that a better way to fight tyranny is to disarm the tyrants.
Guns are a deterrent for tyranny, but the founding fathers never knew that the US would end up with what amounts to an occupation army (the police) being in charge of law enforcement. Police didn't even exist in the US until the 1830s!
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A negligent or minor weapons offense is usually a fine yes, but does carry a maximum sentence of 6 months. So I guess we're both right, hey!
Canada too! Though it is not really enforced. The kind of thing police only care about if there's a complaint or another more serious crime involved.
Still I maybe know 3 hunters within 100 people, which would mean a lot of rifles each
The density of people who hunt is probably higher in rural areas than in citys. Also, lots of farmers have guns.
Farmers’ mums, too
It’s similar in Finland as well. With proper management in training, licensing and registration, gun ownership should be a choice. Some people have a lot of trouble disentangling guns from crime and mental health problems because they only look at the US as the reference. For the record, I am saying all this as someone who doesn’t own a gun and neither am I planning to get one in the near future.
I guess that most of these are hunting rifles and that the average hunter owns much more than a single one, because there is no way 30% of the population are hunters. Instead of dividing the number of legally owned guns by the population, they should try to make a statistic for households that have at least one gun - this is the real one that matters.
It might be the same with the USA, most people don't own guns, but a portion of people own *a lot* of guns.
I suspect the US still leads most of the rest in one-gun households, though.
And hand guns. I own 4 guns and I've used hunting guns since I was 10, but IRL I've seen a hand gun only a couple of times during my life in Finland.
Handguns are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun violence roughly 90%. That being said restrictions on handguns are much less popular than restrictions on rifles, despite rifles killing fewer people.
Because the whole gun debate in the US is fought on ideology rather than facts—on both sides. A lot of people on the gun control side simply don’t know that much about guns and believe that rifles are just always more powerful and more dangerous in every situation. They don’t realize that handguns can even be the superior weapon when shooting at a closer range.
Yep, gun ownership seems to be roughly 30% in the us (and it’s more like 85% in some areas and 15% in others) but those who do own guns either have 1 or several dozen. As such there are reportedly more guns than people in the us. Hard to get concrete numbers though as the us more or less bars tracking them in any meaningful way
42% of adults in the US lived in a houselhold that had a gun in it, in 2017. [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns/) Phone survey, so 42% of adults who are willing to say "Yes, I own a gun" to a stranger on the phone. As a reference, in Sweden, we have about 600k gun owners. Unsure what the adult to non-adult ratio is exactly, but let's say 7-8% of households has a gun in it.
The largest growing reason for ownership is sports shooting
Hunters. They are allowed have an unlimited amount of firearms in Germany. Sweden has a limit of 4, but a high percentage of hunters.
We don't have a limit of 4... it's 6 for hunters. Sport shooters has no such limit. We have a storage limitation that says 20 "points" for a normal gun cabinet else you need a grade 3 safe if you want more than that. A long gun is 1 point, a handgun is 2 points. Full auto (rare to get) is 4 points.
Never heard that rule, learned something today. When I did my jägerexamen all I read was about the vapengarderob.
When did you do it? Pretty sure it's been 6 for quite some time. They will ask why you need gun 5 and 6 though (for hunting) but it's not like it's hard to answer them something. They don't really seem to care as long as you reply with something, e.g. gun 5 is for fox hunting, gun 6 is for birds.
Last year. But I am also a German hunter and I am bringing max 2 rifles with me (klass 1 and hagelgevär). Studying for the Jägarexamen was online, i think if i attended a class or something they would have explained it more thoroughly. Lucky me I guess. And I think the Swedish system is better. I know hunters in Germany with 50+ weapons.
I've heard the German hunting exam is really difficult, though that was some years ago. The Swedish one seems pretty easy in comparison.
German exam tests you on more and deeper content. And there is a third part of the exam where you need to go 5 different panels and answer verbally to random questions, walk through a part of the forest and name all the plants, determine the age of an animal based on its jaw bones/teeth etc. I found the Swedish shooting exam more challenging, though.
What's the shooting part like in Germany? Your theoretical exam sounds insane. You're a hunter, not a field biologist. :P
Just hitting a target sitting and standing and a running rabbit with the shotgun. No skeet or other moving targets.
Not just hunters. Sports shooters have a bunch of stuff at home they have more issues with caliber and handguns than quantity.
Keep in mind many firearm owners will have multiple guns, whether for target shooting or hunting. The latter because different game requires different tools. In Germany there are approximately 1 million firearm owners, so about 1 in 80 people. Mindful much of Germany (geographically) is rural, and how firearms are regularly a part of agricultural life, that’s not surprising.
That's because places like Finland and Vermont show that guns themselves do not cause gun crime. It's the culture that does.
Certain kinds of guns are unlikely to be used in crimes. Namely, semiautomatic long guns and shotguns. Which also happen to be the most useful guns for hunting and ranching applications and are the kinds of guns that are most common in rural areas where they are used as tools, like in Scandinavia. The real gun problem in the U.S. is with handguns, but it’s an issue that’s rarely discussed because neither side of the issue wants to engage in that level of nuance.
Handguns aren't a problem in places like Vermont, which has EU levels of gun homicide rates. Again, it's almost entirely cultural.
Have any statistics on that? I’m sure handgun crime in general is a lot lower in Vermont than in the rest of the country, as it would probably be in any place with an aging population and no city. But I’d still be willing to be that most robberies and murders are done with handguns and that any given handgun is much more likely to be used in a crime than, say, a 12 gauge or even a so-called “assault rifle.”
60% of the murders in Michigan happen in the city of Detroit, which makes up less than 8% of the state's population and all Michiganders have the same access to guns and are subject to the same state and federal gun laws. Guns are not and have never been the problem, if they were, then the murder rate would be more or less equal throughout the state.
Clearly horrible arseholes having access to guns is the problem.
You’re drawing too much of a conclusion from that correlation. We actually can’t draw the conclusion you want to reach without access to information like the actual distribution of guns across different geographies within Michigan, different types of guns that are used in crimes across those geographies, and the correlation between changes in gun availability and crimes with other variables isolated. Instead, what your comparison shows is that 1) gun availability is very unlikely to be the *only* thing driving murder rates; and 2) uniform gun laws across a large area do not result in a uniform distribution of murder rates, which means that gun laws are demonstrably not the only thing that drives murder rates. Those are pretty uncontroversial conclusions. The whole problem with the gun debate is that, by design from ideologues on both sides of this issue, we don’t have good statistics about how much an incremental increase in gun availability causes an incremental increase in different types of crime. It’s absurd to argue that there is no correlation at all, but it’s possible that the correlation isn’t very strong, that other factors are overwhelmingly more significant, and that gun laws have a minimal impact on crime. We just don’t know. I wish we had that info, because we could make much smarter decisions about how to actually reduce crime.
>gun laws have a minimal impact on crime. That's the point I was making. Gun laws only affect the already law abiding and we were never the problem.
It’s a bit of both really, and we have lots of research suggesting guns cause suicide, simply by being available as a convenient means.
Yet some of the worst suicide rates are in countries with some of the fewest guns.
Which doesn't logically contradict lots of research suggesting guns cause suicide, simply by being available as a convenient means.
I mean, idk about Vermont specifically, but its considerably harder to aquire a gun in skandinavia than in the US. So probably that, too.
you forgot to say that there huge % of society that is not mentally healthy and will use guns to harm others, so at the end of the day culture does not mean nothing.
Why? Scandinavia is sparsely populated and theres lot of hunters its big part of culture and finland has conscription too and eternal threat from east.
My guess is most of those are hunting guns. I’d like to see something similar centered on handguns.
Also Austria is surprisingly far up. Getting a gun here is surprisingly easy. I went to civil service so im still prohibited from carrying but ill mabye buy one if i can forbthe lulz
You can still get Category C after refusing military service, just not Cat B. If you have a proper reason (sports shooting or hunting), also B can be given after civil service. https://www.euroshooters.at/zivildiener/
Because it's bull. In France you need a permit to get a gun, so about 5,4 million guns are accounted. Even if you double because of illegal guns (which can't be that much), it's less than 20/100 (and more likely around 10/100). Even if it really were 30 guns for 100 people, we would be nowhere at the same level as Switzerland where it's mandatory to have a gun for national defense.
I live in Germany and I am very surprised by this.
Fairly big countries with lots of farm land
Same. I'm from germany and I've never seen a gun in real life(except holstered guns of police officers). But according to this map, 30-50% of people have one.
I'm Norwegian. I own a shotgun, and two rifles. Two are for hunting (Silver Pidgeon and K98), one for shooting range due to the muzzle velocity not being allowed for hunting anymore (Kragh Jørgensen)
Why?
There's a difference between OWNING a gun and running around with loaded guns in public in the middle of town. You want to do the latter in Germany, you better have a damn good reason for it, such as being a jeweler who regularly has to transport high value merchandise and thus has a significantly higher risk at being robbed than your average Joe. On the other hand, having an unloaded gun in a safe at home and transporting it, unloaded, to the range, where you're a registered member of the club, is just as fine as being a licensed hunter and having an unloaded rifle at home in the safe or in a locked case in your trunk.
Why is that? I know hardly any people in Germany that own guns. Hunting is a thing but it’s not that huge.
Germany has a long tradition of sports shooting and lots and lots of shooting clubs
Germany is just plain wrong. 83 Mio inhabitants and about 5 Mio guns in total for private persons. That comes up to about one weapon for every 17 inhabitants. Get that to 100 inhabitants and you get about 5.8. so nowhere near the 70+ claimed in the map.
In Germany we have a lot of people with a "Kleinwaffenschein", that means guns for hunting, sport and competitions.
This sub’s gone to shite. Ripped Wikipedia* content that’s just basal, monothematic and single dimension data plopped on a map. “MapPorn”? MapBigWBasics.
You're right. Data sources are rarely provided, and I'd guess that's intentional. It's beyond easy to incite a response simply by throwing together a simple visualization, like a map. Most humans are lemmings.
Lemming here, can confirm.
Fancy a leap off the cliff today?
I agree, and some of the maps are just not that interesting
The useless mods simply refuse to force people to even put a source on the map or the country/area they are talking about in the title.
*Reddit's gone to shit
This can’t include illegally obtained firearms. I’m sure in a lot of Central African countries, Syria and Myanmar there are more guns than that
I mean, I am sure our (italian) mafias also have a few guns and I doubt they are registered Edit: looked it up and apparently we have 1.5 million registered firearms and 6.6 M unregistered ones lol https://www.corriere.it/politica/24_gennaio_04/italia-8-milioni-armi-usa-dimostrano-non-ci-renderanno-piu-sicuri-2c157b22-aad1-11ee-97df-1dec2b8b830c.shtml
When I was in Afghanistan fucking everyone in the countryside seemed to have a gun
I'm surprised Uruguay is so high. Is there a lot of hunting there? Or self-defense concerns?
As far as I know from reading on the subject. Uruguayans just have a general interest in firearms, similar to the Swiss in that regard.
Half of the population lives in a big city, the rest is spread around the country, lots of rural areas driving the gun ownership per capita up, I was raised in a small town and there were like a gun, a rifle a shotgun and an air pellet rifle I used to play with as a kid, I remember my parents just telling to me, you may use the pellet rifle, not the others, which Is kinda wild now I think about it, but I always obeyed.
Lots of hunting, mostly birds but also some deer
The map scale really kind of hides the numbers for the US. There are over 100 privately-owned firearms per 100 people in the US, and that's not considering guns in use for law enforcement and military. It'd be like color coding the countries by population and make a top category of "over 500,000" for China and india.
This is an interesting map. One of the ideas you often hear in pro-gun circles is that places like Europe and Australia are so restrictive that they make it impossible for law-abiding citizens to own guns. But assuming that the dataset used to create this may is accurate, that clearly isn't true.
Can't speak entirely for other countries but in New Zealand people tend to either own no guns or several. Maybe something like a shotgun a .22LR and a .270.
This is actually the same in the US. There are more guns than people in the US, but less than 50% of Americans own a gun ([1](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/), [2](https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx), [3](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/)). The numbers vary but its often down towards 40%\~ of Americans owning a gun. And If you dig into it more, its not that every gun owner in America has 3 guns. Its typically that most Americans do not own a gun, most American gun owners own only 1 gun, then there's that smaller group that owns 20 guns each.
Its funny that this applies to my family as well. There are 12 people in my family. 4 people are gun owners with a total of 33 guns. 3 people have 1 gun each. 1 person owns 30 (probably more than that)
Percentage of people who own guns in American will always be reported lower than it really is. It’s a BIG thing in the gun community not to let the government know you have guns.
I'm sure the crime community doesn't report everything either. And not just in the US.
Much like people owning guitars, most own none, some own 1 and a handful own two dozen.
Interestingly New Zealand has twice the rate of gun ownership compared to Australia, yet on average they have a slightly lower murder rate.
I suspect most murders don’t involve guns in either country
In Italy they were kinda common, here there was a huge hunting tradition. As the years passed, the cost for a licence raised a bit tho
If we assume that this map is accurate, you’re not reaching the right conclusion in my opinion. The data, atleast from the study that generated this chart, doesn’t support the conclusion here. The chart came from the 2017 Small Arms Survey. According to that study, the US’s number of civilian owned guns per capita is 120. The higher European per capita is Serbia at 39. Australia is 14.5.
Look at the legend and then at the actual stats... America has 120/100 people and the highest metric us 75+ lol. This map is misleading as fuck.
No, Australia does not make it, "impossible for law-abiding citizens to own guns". Where did you get that idea?
It's not even particularly difficult to own a gun in most European countries. You generally need a reason, but this can be as simple as being a member of a shooting club or a hunter or farmer. A couple countries (like Czechia) even allow self-defense as a reason. The biggest reason there are fewer gun owners is that fewer people care to own them in the first place.
Since they're all do military service, all Swiss men have the option of keeping their full auto weapon at home at some point in their lives...
The ammo stored at the police station and the police are fully aware of the guns secured location. Not the same at all.
Personal ownership of firearms, including semi-automatic rifles, is not particularly difficult at all in Switzerland. Storing ammo (securely) in a residence is also perfectly legal in Switzerland. A reservists’ issued service rifle has certain stipulations attached to it and any issued ammo must be kept in a sealed container outside of official use or emergencies but that’s not so for personally owned rifles and ammo.
>any issued ammo must be kept in a sealed container outside of official use or emergencies Taschenmunition (issued ammo to keep at home in case of war) stopped being issued in 2007. You can get your own ammo privately though.
Police station? What? Ammo is stored at one's military assembly point, not a civilian police station. Also, one can but ammunition privately, so it isn't like most Swiss army issued soldiers have NO access to ammunition. The Swiss post will deliver it to your door from an online order to a sporting goods or gun store.
The ammo is common 5,55x45mm also known as .223 Remington - videly available to civilian market.
This gets repeated on reddit frequently and is not true. Years ago they had a requirement to store a sealed box at home. That's no longer required and also you could buy all the other ammo you want.
Stop trying to make Europe a gun laws sound like American guns laws, they simply are not similar. Many American states have permit less open carry, for example. You guys are lying to support gun manufacturers and murder.
Actually most Swiss men don't serve in the army, the wide majority of the population doesn't either But yes, you have the possibility of keeping your issued gun at home during service (there's less than 150k military-issued guns at the same time VS up to 4.5mio civilian-owned guns)
In the UK, guns are owned by framers, hunters and sport shooting. Farmers being by far the biggest group. Most of these groups are likely to own more than one gun.
Don't forget farmers' mums.
\*carry guns
No. Im an Australian. You just do a half day course to get a licence and then its sent to you in a few months and you can get a gun. All you have to do is pass a test with things like do you point guns at people if its not loaded. Do you keep your gun locked in a safe or loaded on the kitchen cabinet. Then you go to the shooting range and as long as you dont point it at anyone youll pass. What is more restrictive is the type of guns. If you want a semi youre going to have to be a licensed and professional hunter working in regional areas and even thats pretty hard. But if you just want a 22 its pretty easy. Ill add guns and the cost of keeping them is more as well. So youll need the licence, join a shooting range as a member (or own/have permission to use a large farm), have a safe and then buy the gun and ammo which are way more expensive than the states. So you probably need to be middle class to afford it.
Italian here. Italy has some of the most permissive gun laws in Europe, and it is fairly easy to get a license for a hunting or sporting weapon. And it is also quite easy to have the right to possess a weapon IN THE HOUSE. Basically you have to go to the police station, prove that you are not a drug addict or an alcoholic, and you have a license. What is very limited, on the other hand, is to carry a gun around. "Free carry" is almost impossible to get unless you are law enforcement or you do a job that is considered an armed assault risk such as security guard or night watchman. If you have a hunting license you can have a weapon in your car only in hunting season and on the way to the woods, if you have a sporting license you have to explicitly state "I live at the address...I shoot at the address..." and if you are caught with your sporting rifle not on the road between the two the weapon is seized. I think that's the main difference with American states, where instead you often have the right to carry your weapon with you wherever you go.
As an Australian I can confirm that the rest of the world have this idea that we completely banned all guns.
It kind of made it sound like that in the media! (Here in the US anyway).
"Gun ownership" does not equal "number of guns per 100 people." Semi misleading title.
Crazy how that doesn’t coordinate with homicides
It's almost like nobody actually thinks it's that simple.
Some people watch too much TV
 Americans need to do better!
#1 we aint neva gonna stap!
I own six guns, want to buy 3 more.
I was wondering who was making up for me not owning a gun. I live in NJ and only 9% of the population own a guy. I'm in a rural part of NJ and during COVID lock down I realized I was the only one in my area without a gun as all my neighbors set up makeshift target ranges on their properties to shoot, to pass the time since everything else was shut down.
> own a guy I hope the 9% aren't bringing back slavery
Texan, I actually have an inappropriately low amount of guns. Joke
Thank goodness it's rural because that would be irresponsible. I didn't read rural at first and got concerned
Years ago I remember a person had to be at least 300 feet away from the nearest building, road, etc., to legally discharge a firearm in my state, whether it be for hunting or target practice. Of course, a careless person could still strike somebody since a bullet can travel well over 300 feet. I just looked it up and found out each municipality has their own rules. Some towns the rule is 450 feet but in my town it’s only 200 feet. The last time I heard about somebody getting struck accidentally was when a hunter got injured by buckshot from another at a public park 20+ years ago.
It’s 15’ from the road in my state :)
Hey, look at Uruguay…who knew they loved guns like they love soccer and rugby!
What is the source of this?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated\_number\_of\_civilian\_guns\_per\_capita\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country) The fidelity of the map is not great. Not counting territories, there is 1 entry in the 75+ segment, 1 entry in the 50-75 segment, and 10 entries in the 30-50 segment. The rest of the world is in the other segments. Should probably have kept 10-30 in segments of 5.
The US and Yemen are both black, but there is no war in the US.
Can you do gun related violence next?
USA should have it’s own colour
On this map... it does!
China, what about Marx’s “Under no pretext” confuses yall?
I feel that the lack of guns there has more to do with the east asian weak gun culture, than their authoritarian government. If you see the other east asian countries you will see that their gun ownership is low aswell
Agreed. Weapons, even kitchen knives are frowned upon in East Asian culture.
America has too many guns. But what a lot of people, even in Americans don’t realize is that a little less than half of Americans own a gun. It’s just that gun owners tend to have on average 2-3 guns so we end up with more guns than people. I for example am an American from a medium sized east coast city I don’t know anyone who owns a gun here. Where I go on vacation in the mountains of Pennsylvania everyone owns a gun.
More guns = better life confirmed
Wow, one of the interesting consequences of this is it would probably be really hard to occupy the US. The occupiers would basically constantly be shot at from every window.
Luckily, all you need is social media.
That's what americans keep saying to themselves and why gun enjoyers have so many guns: fictional scenarios. The USA are impossible to occupy for multiple reasons. Very large territory with vast swaths of nothingness is the main one. There's just no army in the world (even the US army) that could actively occupy that the US. And it has very little to do with gun ownership.
Dont forget the two giant oceans and massive coastlines on either side. Invading the US isn't really an easy thing to do, even if we didn't have a massive military, nukes, and guns lying around all over the place, it would still take a tremendous amount of time and effort just to take even a single state, enough to exhaust any nation and make it not worth it. Full colonization took hundreds of years, and the effort of several empires.
It’s just a sales ploy. “Buy our product so you can defend your country! Be a patriot!” Americans eat that shit up. Meanwhile the people that actually defend the country (soldiers) have gun/ammo restrictions and mandatory training.
No need, we’ll destroy ourselves
There's a quote attributed to Admiral Yamamoto of Japan during WW2 that states "We could never invade America, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass". To this day it's still heavily debated as to whether or not Yamamoto actually made this statement, but it is fairly sound logic.
Well plenty of middle eastern countries, US has occupied are like this. Easier to acquire gun than beer. They still get rolled over. Assuming a foreign military power can roll over US military, it can easily occupy most of the US. The civilians might have guns but if the opposition has attack helicopters, armored vehicles, tanks, artillery, mortars, missiles. I dont think a gun would make much a difference.
You mean the middle eastern countries that the US had to pull out of because their armed militia/terrorist groups were able to wage a successful guerrilla war? Thats a poor example for your point, especially since there are examples of your point being correct, and you chose an incorrect one.
You mean the guerilla groups that got their asses blasted over and had to hide in mountains till it was no longer economical feasible for american occupation. The casualty rates for US were one of the lowest, they ran successful occupation till they decided to pull out. Every single one of them whether it be Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. The US is excellent at occupation, however it is pathetic in building functioning and competent government or military.
USA USA USA
It’s funny because here in the USA if your a legal gun owner you can straight up build your own gun, you simply buy the parts online, they show up to your door and you assemble it
Not the main component - which in case of AR15 is the "lower". You need to make that one on your own (or from 80% prefabricate).
Yes sir I have a couple of 80% lowers myself
3d printer go brrrrr
You need to go through a background check for the receiver. Unless you get an 80% receiver. Then you have to machine it for it to be functional.
I'm unaware of political scenarios of US but can anyone here inform me why US has so many guns per capita? What are its possible implications in their society?
It’s worth noting that it’s not evenly distributed. Something like 1/3 of Americans own guns but there are more guns than people in the US. That’s largely because of a smaller percentage of gun enthusiasts with a LOT of guns. My FIL for example had about 60 and that’s not considered particularly a lot in some circles.
Can confirm. I own 3 firearms.
Gun Culture + High Expendable Income + Easiness of Acquiring a Gun = Lots of Guns around!
Also they have amazing wide and varied wilderness and a strong outdoor culture
Guns are for Americans what bicycles are for the Dutch.
Both are useful for reducing carbon emissions 😉
wild West/frontier history, large percentage of people own land, ease of ownership, they're fun
This video explains it https://youtu.be/L1iQUF1gQmI?si=y0nEfqrPU0VTRX17
There are more guns in the USA than there are people. Each gun owner has several guns not just 1.
It didn't happen until social media and a perfect marketing strategy took over. Nobody owned an AR 15 before that basically. NRA helps drive the fear which makes gun companies endless money.
Down vote those facts💪
wow africa must be completely genocide free and never once had a mass murder
Yeah, guns are illegal in some of the most dangerous African countries…they have high gun ownership, it’s just illegal so isn’t represented.
I was referencing the rwanda genocide that was completely done with Machetes. But ok
This map is deceptive. America has twice as many guns per person than any other country. This color scale hides the details rather than illuminating them. Either propaganda or bad map making.
The colorbar is right there. What exactly is the issue?
In the Netherlands bike ownership is a thing
Another chart, great
🦅
If you changed the largest scale to >500 this graphic would look the same
there are more firearms in the US than there are people, about 20% more to be precise
USA! USA! USA!
Would be interesting to then see a correlation to ‘ethnic diversity’.