*** Youtube/Video thread ***

He claims that 300 people are shot per year in the UK...I think he's taking the number of people actually shot in the UK per year and multiplying it by the difference in population between the UK and the USA. Or (more likely in my opinion) someone else did that and he's misunderstood the figure and never bothered checking.

I'm not backing this guy up or anything but I'm also not sure what you're trying to say here. I get the impression that you think it's higher than 300/year? A quick glance and calculation using the firearm deaths per 100k population on Wikipedia says there were 145 firearm related deaths in the UK in 2011, 38 of which were homicidal. From the same table, the US figures for 2014 were 33612 deaths, 10938 homicidal. He stated 11 thousand deaths in the US so he was way out with 300 in the UK when it should actually have been 38.
 
I'm not backing this guy up or anything but I'm also not sure what you're trying to say here. I get the impression that you think it's higher than 300/year?

The opposite. The population of the USA is much larger than the population of the UK, not much smaller.

If you pick the right year and scale up the number of people shot dead in the UK by the ratio between the population of the USA and the population of the UK, you can get a figure of about 300 and say "the number of people shot in the UK is equivalent to about 300 people being shot in the USA (taking into account the difference in populations)."

I suspect that the person in this video went looking online, saw someone else doing that, didn't pay attention, misinterpreted it as ~300 people being shot per year in the UK and didn't bother checking.
 
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