30th July, 2012
With only five percent of the world’s population residing in the United States of America, the country now owns 50 percent of the world’s guns, said Fareed Zakaria, Host of Fareed Zakaria GPS at CNN.
Quoting government sources, Zakaria disclosed that 88 percent of Americans or 88 out every 100 people in the U.S. own guns and one out of every three persons there knows someone who has been shot.
“We are the world’s most heavily-armed civilian population. Yemen is second at 54 (people with a gun out of hundred). Serbia and Iraq are among the other countries in the top 10,” Zakaria lamented.
He said the U.S. has three gun homicides per 100,000 people, which, according to him, is four times more than Switzerland, 10 times more than India and 20 times more than Australia and England.
“Gun homicide rates haven’t improved at all. They were at roughly the same levels in 2009 as they were in 2000.
“Meanwhile, serious but non-fatal gun injuries caused during assault have actually increased in the last decade by 20 percent, as gun laws have gotten looser and getting automatic weapons has become easier,” Zakaria lamented.
Zakaria was reflecting on the senseless killings of 20 July on moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, by a lone gunman who easily purchased weapons and gunned down12 people and injured 58 others.
“The United States stands out from the rest of the world not because it has more nutcases – I think we can assume that those people are sprinkled throughout every society equally –but because it has more guns,” he said.
—Simon Ateba