#iamchimp

1. Actually, suicides account for more than 19,000 of those 30,000, so it's actually closer to 2/3rds. Those 19,000 deaths made up roughly half of the total number of suicides in the US. If we assumed that every single one of those gun-based suicides would not have happened if guns were banned, then we'd only get to the suicide rate of England + Wales (1 in 16000, versus 1 in 8000). 2. Notice that I didn't mention death in my statistics. Unfortunately, we can't simply compare murders to murders, because the US and UK use drastically different methods of counting them:

[Americans] count and report crimes based on initial data. The Brits count and report crimes based on the outcome of the investigation and trial. [...] Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction.

So while the headline murder rate in the UK is about 15% of the US's, that's because the US counts any "death of interest to the police", regardless of whether or not anyone is ever punished for the crime. Even worse, coroners in the UK have stopped even reporting the number of violent deaths, and have started using "narrative" results, which do not lend themselves to statistical analysis. Such narrative inquests are over 15% of the total number of inquests by coroners, or roughly 4500 in 2011. Using a population number of 56 million, that's 1 per 12444 people. In the US, the murder rate in 2011 was 1 in 24478, or half what the UK numbers imply.