Do Americans Have the Same Human Nature as Everyone Else?

America bristles with firearms. You can safely assume that everybody you see has one hidden on their person or within easy reach. This is not true, but it is close enough to being true that you certainly would not want to make the opposite assumption.

Firearms advocates, who want to see as many people carrying guns as possible, claim that this makes us safer. They have all kinds of rationalizations and anecdotes to support this.

But the numbers tell a different story. Here are some numbers from Wikipedia regarding the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people per year in recent years. The article appears well-referenced and I consider it more reliable than either conservative or liberal things I see floating around the web.

Country	Firearm deaths per 100,000 per year
Australia	1.06
Austria	2.95
Brazil	19.03
Canada	2.38
Colombia	28.14
Costa Rica	6.28
Denmark	1.45
France	3.01
Germany	1.24
Honduras	64.8
Israel	1.87
Italy	1.28
Japan	0.06
Mexico	11.17
Netherlands	0.46
Nicaragua	7.29
Norway	1.78
South Korea	0.06
Sweden	1.47
UK	0.25
USA	10.3

Clearly, the United States has one of the highest rates of firearm-related homicides in the world—not as high as countries with lots of organized crime, like Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras, but higher than virtually anyone else. Our rate is even higher than Nicaragua, a Central American nation whose socialistic government we considered so evil in the 1980s that President Reagan used illegal means to get firearms to the right-wing “contras.” But if you compare us to countries that have similar living conditions to ours, or so we think, we have ten to a hundred times as many firearm deaths per capita. Just compare the UK and the USA. We cannot claim that there is no social strife in Europe; they have ethnic and economic tensions just as we do. Perhaps ethnic uniformity explains the exceptionally low firearm death rates in Japan and South Korea, but not the UK, France, Germany, or Italy, where they have social tensions with Gypsies and Muslims.

Americans have more guns and more gun deaths. Most other countries have fewer guns and fewer gun deaths. Clearly guns are not keeping us safe from gun deaths.

There appear to me to be two possible explanations. One is that we have too many guns at least in the hands of people who are not capable of handling the responsibility. The other is that there is something exceptional about America that makes us different from everybody else. “American exceptionalism” is usually meant as a belief that America and Americans have special privileges in the world; to religious conservatives it means that we are specially blessed of God, God’s people. A lot of conservative megachurches have American flag backdrops for their services. But if this is so, then it means that one way that we are exceptional is that we are exceptionally bloodthirsty.

There’s something different about an American that will make him (sometimes her) ten to a hundred times more likely to shoot your brains out (or your children’s brains out) than someone from any other country except those with drug cartels or civil wars. What might this be? If it is not simply the fact that so many Americans have guns, then it must be something about us.

I refuse to believe the latter without further proof. I believe that all humans have the same human nature, based on the recent evolutionary diversification of all races only about 100,000 years ago. I do not believe that Americans are biologically or intrinsically more bloodthirsty than Englishmen. I believe that the problem is too many unregulated guns. We need gun regulations—not by themselves but in conjunction with education and a deliberate cultural effort to shift the way we think. If you say that this is impossible, then think about what you are saying: that Americans are intrinsically bloodthirsty.

Either our gun problem is a problem that can be solved, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t then we should hang our heads in shame and not meet the eyes of the rest of the world, recognizing ourselves as incorrigibly bloodthirsty. If there is a third alternative, I am not aware of it and my readers are welcome to post a third alternative.

Happy Fourth of July!