The gun control industry has made much of an obscure study concerning firearm fatalities in high-income countries. Because all politics (by low minded people) is wedge politics, they grabbed the one horrible sound bite from the study, namely that “86% of all women killed by firearms were US women.” ¹ (emphasis mine)

We have already covered … endlessly … that though America’s suicide rate is not high, the preferred means for American suicide is with a gun (Canadians have an identical suicide rate, but own fewer guns, and thus tend to poison themselves more often). Thus, it is of little surprise that more suicidal American women die by guns and thus more American women are “killed by firearms.” Even this study noted that “the US firearm suicide rate … for females … was 14.4 times higher.”

But the gun control industry spin goes deeper. They like contrasting America with other “high-income” countries because they know as well as anyone that the rest of the world routinely sinks into homicidal chaos. And the worst of the worst nations – Rwanda, Somalia, Syria – they don’t even report their homicide statistics, which makes well-heeled nations look downright saintly by comparison.

When we dig a bit, we find that American women are much better off than ladies in other rich nations. My first clue was in the same study when they showed negligible difference in both gun and non-gun female homicides in the U.S. (2.1 and 1.8 per 100,000 population).  This indicates that guns are not a direct determinant when it comes to someone wanting to kill an American woman. The gun homicide rate for men however is seven times larger. So if anything, the gun control industry should be screaming about how guns are a greater threat to men in America.

All this falderal made me curious, so I dug-up international homicide numbers for men and women. One interesting table comes from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and lists the percentage of homicides by sex. Over all, the world kills women 11% more often than in the United States, making women here a safe lot. I whittled down the list to the same set of high income countries as in the study cited by the gun control industry.

Guess what?

In high income countries, America was on the bottom of the list for female homicides, with the exception of Luxembourg (I have been to Luxembourg, and the place is so small and pleasant, homicides are statistically impractical and culturally unlikely). In fact, other high income countries have an 82% higher female to male homicide ratio than the United States (of murdered members of the American populace, 22% of victims are women, whereas in Japan 53% are).

One possible explanation is that American women are armed, and female victims in New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Finland, etc. are not. Criminologists have shown that when a thug believes their victims are armed, they don’t attack. Perhaps Japanese women should hit the underground markets and acquire the best pistol they can find there. Might raise their longevity numbers a bit.