In his letter to the Herald last week (“Read Harvard study about U.S. and guns,” page A4), Art Ellison noted from the Harvard study that the U.S. does not have the world’s highest murder rate, and that other countries have mass shootings too.

What Mr. Ellison failed to mention was those countries with higher murder rates and mass killings are nothing like us. Countries like us — that is, reasonably wealthy, Western democracies — have murder rates and gun murder rates that are a fraction of ours. To compare U.S. murder rates with Uganda or Guatemala isn’t really germane to the question of guns in the U.S.

Guns just make it easier for us to murder each other. I think the real question is why we murder each other at a rate much higher than countries like ours.

Our intentional murder rate is 4.7 per 100,000 people. It’s less than 1 per 100,000 in France, Germany, Belgium, Norway, the U.K., Canada, Australia.

We attend church at a much higher rate than the people in those countries do, urging us to do good. We have the highest incarceration rate, urging us not to do bad. And still we murder each other at a rate more than four times higher than comparable countries do.

Minorities? Gangs? France has gangs, big cities, crime, unhappy minorities. Same with the U.K. Half the population of London is minority, and the murder rate is 1.6 per 100,000. Italy: .9 murders per 100,000. France: 1.0 per 100,000.

Marseilles, France, is famous for gangs and drugs, and has a murder rate of 1.4 per 100,000.

In this country, Louisiana has the highest murder rate: 11.2 per 100,000. Then Alabama, 7.2. Then Mississippi, 6.5. These are rural states with relatively low populations. You’d think Illinois — Chicago — would rank high, but that state ranks 11th. California — Los Angeles — ranks 21st.

Those countries like us have the same movies, video games, bad parents, mental illness rates, etc., that we do. And yet …

Our problem is either the guns, or it’s us. If it’s the guns, then we’d better do something about them. If it is us — that is, if we are somehow more violent and murderous than people in countries like ours — perhaps we can’t be trusted with guns.

I don’t have answers. I just have one question: Why do we kill each other more than people like us do?

Thad McManus
Poulsbo