Is It the Guns?

Quote Say Uncle, "North Dakota experienced only two murders in 2008. Both were stabbings."

Yeah. The significance is that North Dakota is thick with guns. My family is from South Dakota, not far from the state line. For cultural distinctions, it's the same sort of place. As an eighth grader there, I had access to a cabinet full of firearms. As I recall, there were three or four shotguns, a couple of deer rifles, a smaller caliber rifle for smaller targets, and a revolver to carry while on horseback (although we rarely used that). My classmates at the time had similar caches at home. As far as I can tell not much has changed there in the intervening years.

I lived in Colombia around the same time. We had no guns while living there, since they are illegal barring lengthy permitting processes or bribing someone. Very few of the Colombians I knew had guns. I did know many Colombians who were murdered, a really astonishing number. Legal gun ownership there is uncommon, and illegal guns are far less common than legal ones here. The Colombian National Police reported 36.53 murders per 100,000 residents in 2005, including a rate of 6.94 non-gun homicides. That's down a bit from the year before. 2005 by comparison was a bad year in North Dakota - the murder rate was 1.89 per 100,000. (That same year South Dakota's rate was 2.32. I think they get more tourists there.)

Having lived in both places, I have some idea of why Colombia's murder rate is roughly 20 times higher than the gun ridden Dakotas. One thing I'm sure of, it's not the difference in firearm ownership.