My support for gun ownership rights is not universal and unqualified.

[spin]

33. Of course we have more gun deaths. ...

There are an estimated 300,000,000 firearms in our nation and 80,000,000 people own them.

Our next door neighbor Mexico has extremely strong gun laws. I imagine you would love to see them passed here.

MEXICO CITY JOURNAL
At a Nation’s Only Gun Shop, Looking North in Disbelief

By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: July 24, 2012


MEXICO CITY — Juan García relinquished his cellphone, walked through two metal detectors, registered with a uniformed soldier — and then finally entered Mexico’s only legal gun store.

To anyone familiar with the 49,762 licensed gun dealers in the United States, or the 7,261 gun-selling pawn shops, the place looked less like a store than a government office. Customers waited on metal chairs near a fish tank to be called up to a window to submit piles of paperwork. The guns hung in drab display cases as if for decoration, with not a single sales clerk offering assistance.

***snip***

The 1917 Constitution written after Mexico’s bloody revolution, for example, says that the right to carry arms excludes those weapons forbidden by law or reserved for use by the military, and it also states that “they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations.”

The government added more specific limits after the uprisings in the 1960s, when students looted gun stores in Mexico City. So under current law, typical customers like Rafael Vargas, 43, a businessman from Morelos who said he was buying a pistol “to make sure I sleep better,” must wait months for approval and keep his gun at home at all times.

His purchase options are also limited: the largest weapons in Mexico’s single gun store — including semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the Aurora attack — can be bought only by members of the police or the military. Handgun permits for home protection allow only for the purchase of calibers no greater than .38, so the most exotic option in the pistol case here consisted of a Smith & Wesson revolver selling for $803.05.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/world/americas/in-mexico-a-restrictive-approach-to-gun-laws.html

We might agree that Mexico is a gun control advocates dream of utopia. Surely a nation with such gun laws must be a far safer place to live than the United States. After all gun control advocates often claim that guns are designed only for killing and if there were no or fewer guns available to civilians, the murder rate would surely decrease.

Perhaps not.

Mexico’s Violent Murder Rate Is More Than Twice That of USA
November 12, 2010 - 4:45 PM
By Edwin Mora

(CNSNews.com) – Individuals run a greater risk of being violently murdered in Mexico than in the United States, where the population is more than three times larger than its southern neighbor.

Mexico’s secretary of Interior, Francisco Blake Mora, said there currently are 12 violent homicides registered for every 100,000 Mexican residents, as reported in the Nov. 10 El Universal, a Spanish-language newspaper in Mexico.

In other words, about 1 in every 8,300 residents is violently murdered in Mexico.

***snip***

FBI data show that in the United States, “There were 5.0 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009, an 8.1 percent decrease from the 2008 rate.”

That means that in 2009 there was 1 murder per 20,000 U.S. inhabitants. When compared to Mexico’s current rate of 1 murder per 8,300 Mexican residents, an individual runs a greater risk of being violently murdered in Mexico than in the United States.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/mexico-s-violent-murder-rate-more-twice-usa