In response to your sidenote, bullshit. Whining about downvotes without "saying why" is an idiot's move. Replying to that whining (as I am doing now) might possibly be an idiot's move, I'm not sure. But voting is not an idiot's move, and lack of explanation does not make it so.

Upvotes and downvotes add the same thing to the conversation: 1) They're a system by which the collective collectively modifies what comments get seen, and in what order 2) They're a system of feedback about what is a valuable contribution

Neither of those contributions requires "saying why". Of course, it is true that the second function works a lot better if the voter communicates a "why", that's easy to see. But it's easy to see that the first function is served just fine by voting without comments (and indeed, since your downvoted comment was erroneous, the conversation benefited from it being removed via downvoting).

Further, we all already know that some explanations of "why" distract from the conversation more than they contribute. The most-obvious example is "+1 agree" or "+1 this", or even "+1 this comment told me something I didn't know". Or, in your case, people could have commented "-1 unsubstantiated" or "-1 parent post misread FA" or something.

Either way, whining about voting _really_ doesn't add to the conversation. If I had downvote ability, I'd downvoting comments that complain about downvotes.

tl;dr: Downvotes without explanations are just as much a positive contribution to the conversation as upvotes.

To be fair that's for England and Wales, not the UK.

In Northern Ireland (where as far as I'm aware the gun law is the same) it's 6.82.

It's interesting that England and Wales features in 7th lowest spot for death rate whereas Northern Ireland is 7th highest.

The stats in this table are terribly out of date. I'm not criticizing your post, just pointing it out. Also odd the authors of this article chose to publish 2 numbers for the U.S. I interpret them for corresponding to 2004/1993, which means there was a significant difference between those two years, not the rate is between those numbers.

I've bemoaned the difficulty in finding reliable, research-quality statistical data like this for a long time. I've even tried to raise capital to for a start-up to do this. No luck.

You'll find similar differences between the "feet and fists" death rate. What are the "feet" control laws?

And, the UK's low firearms death rates predate the firearms laws, which largely occurred post-WWI to stop a communist takeover.

Note the US' firearms death rate isn't uniform. For example, most of the peninsula's is better than the UK's best, but East Palo Alto, which has exactly the same laws (and lower firearms ownership than Palo Alto), is horrendously worse.

Parts of the US are third-world, with all that that entails. Gun control won't change that.

I'm amazed this has got 52 upvotes. Thats 52 people who want to stop a discussion thats unearthing lots of very interesting statistics.

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is absolutely correct. In the UK it's easy for law enforcement to find certain types of criminal simply because they are in posession of firearms.