Nobody ever at the U.S.A. homicide rate, although the stories of toddlers shooting themselves and others are scary reading.

What has Europeans and  are the mass shootings not causing a ban on 'assault' type weapons like the one used in Orlando.

And this kind of statistics.

"Assault weapons" is a bogus term. Assault weapons are fully automatic and already heavily regulated.

What our media calls "assault weapons" just look scary but a functionally equivalent to other rifles that don't look "military". Those rifles are much more expensive and are priced out of the range of the general public.

The AR-15 is ~$1000-1500. Expensive but not completely out of the range of the average guy.

This gun, the Mini-14, is functionally equal to the evil AR-15.

Same cartridge, same rate of fire, same magazines.

These aren't assault rifles. They are semi-automatic rifles of medium caliber.

This is an Assault Rifle. It's the FN FAL. Fully automatic, burst adjustable. 

It fires the heavy 7.62mm cartridge that can chew down cinder block walls.

You may have overlooked the ' ' around 'assault' meaning to show my ignorance of weapon terms. Tell me the correct word for the weapon used in Orlando, and I shall edit my post accordingly.

Now back to statistics.

You may be #108 in the world. You're even able to say there are European countries with comparable rates. They range from Estonia to Lithuania, while Russia is in a different league.

Estonia 3.1
Moldova 3.2
Montenegro 3.2
Belarus 3.6
USA 3.9
Latvia 3.9
Albania 4.0
Ukraine 4.3
Lithuania 5.5

Russia 9.5

If those are the countries you like USA to be compared with, fine by me. I find it sad, but as Graeme says, we cannot apply our rules and ideas to USA.

Btw the average rate for Europe: 1.85 (including Russia), 1.54 (excluding Russia). For Scandinavia: 0.7, just so you know how my POV starts.   Oh, and I'm pro-hunting and have no problems with shot-guns and rifles meant for that purpose.
 

Europe does not have more guns than people.

The United States simply can't get rid of them all without leaving significant numbers of them in the wrong hands.

We are damned if we do and darned if we don't.

Darned is way better.

At one point my Remington 1100 12 GA shotgun was on the banned "assault weapon" list as it is semi automatic, forget the facts that it can hold a maximum of 5 (yes, grand total five) shells, and that is only if you remove a factory installed spacer in the magazine.

An anti gun activist once asked me "What the hell do you need an assault weapon like that for?"

Well let's see, I was competing in both trap and skeet at the time, expending anywhere from 200 to 250 rounds a day, many as part of "doubles" where two clay birds are thrown at the same time.

Had I attempted to practice that much using a double barrel, my shoulder would have been permanently purple. The semi auto action reduces the recoil considerably.

What made my 12 GA any worse than a double barrel? The fact that it "reloads itself".

See, that's why I didn't want to use the term semi-automatic earlier, because I knew that would be inaccurate too.

James, I assume you're also going to call out W_L in the Pit for this quote:

Disallowing him to complete his gun purchases of assault style weapon? Yes.

And thank you for explaining to me that what you meant is it's OK for U.S.A. to have a high homicide rate, because you have a high number of guns per capita. Now I understand.

the pertinent fact in Orlando is that Mateen did not need an automatic, or a machine gun. Using his legally bought and owned semi-automatic he was able to keep on firing bullets into people, efficiently shooting them at a rate of around one bullet a second - more than enough to keep killing and killing and killing (repeat 49 times) fit and able adolescent and adult males and females without any individual or group of individuals being able to overpower him and stop the slaughter.  

Gun lobby supporters who trot out the same hackneyed response "it's not guns that kill people, people kill people" are wilfully diverting attention from the real truth: legally bought and owned semi-automatic weapons such as Mateen used make mass murders like this much more likely because they make it so EASY.

Thanks to the European contingent for you input. You don't seem to understand that as there are more guns than people in the United States, there just IS NOT an easy cure.

If we were stupid enough to ban them, we would never get them all, probably spark a civil war and, those of us that followed the law would be at the mercy of the lawless. 

again, the issue of Mateen's legally bought and owned semi-automatic mass murder killing machine has simply been avoided

Conflating that with the Constitutional "right to bear arms", or where the US is now in terms of its absurd level of gun ownership and the difficulties that presents, is just... absurd

There was a recent but brief period when such weapons were made illegal. Did the US fall into the Crack of Doom? No.

Eh, scratch that. I just need to focus on writing... 

It's good to know that KC is not in the top 30 and no surprise at all that STL is #3. I have always been a proud Kansas City native, because it's a much safer city for one thing. One thing that puzzles me is this. From my understanding Czech Republic and Switzerland also have fairly relaxed gun laws when compared to most of Europe. They're more restrictive than the US, but they allow defensive of property and such and are not limited to hunting. 

Good point about Switzerland, Tiger. Perhaps the difference in homicide rate isn't so much the guns per capita number, but the types of gun which are legal to own ? Though I guess most of the 12,000+ yearly deaths in U.S.A. are caused by hand guns and other single or a-few-shots-at-a-time weapons.

Anyway, I agree with James it's not so much the Homicide Rate itself, which is troublesome. It's the mass shootings and the fact they do not lead to a ban of those type of weapons (whatever their technically correct name) which are capable of firing a high number of shots per minute. But I guess to the NRA and their supporters a gun is a gun is a gun...

Over here most commenters in the media are resigned to the fact gun control will never happen in the U.S.A. so I think we should be too. It's something uniquely American like the influence of religion in politics, and Donald Trump.

Rapid fire weapons are called assault rifles or in case of being smaller weapons like uzis, sub machine guns. People act like these weapons are readily available to anyone. They are not. An uzi costs anywhere from 5-10k USD. That is not generally a price you can pay on a credit card unless you've got really good credit. Otherwise, you must use cash. Also, a federal license is required. Buying these weapons on the black market is a federal crime, a big one. People who sell and purchase such weapons illegally and get caught by the ATF, FBI, or US Marshalls go to prison for a very long time.