I wrote what's below as a reply to a comment in a recent Facebook post of mine regarding the Uvalde, TX school massacre. The commenter trotted out the canard, oft repeated in conservative Christian circles, that the underlying reason for gun violence (and a myriad of other social ills) in the U.S. is because prayer was removed from public schools (in 1962), and our nation is becoming steadily more secularized. 

 

Former Arkansas Governor and perennial right-wing media pundit Mike Huckabee stated after the Sandy Hook school massacre: "We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" 

 

In the wake of the Uvalde mass shooting, Franklin Graham, who is now president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and of Samaritan's Purse, stated "We have taken God out of schools and most homes are leaving God out of the rearing of their children. He is the solution. The more we turn our backs on God and His Word, the more problems we have as individuals and as a nation." 

 

Of course, this doesn't explain the several mass shootings that have occurred at churches.

 

Another common association made is that since we allow abortion, God allows the slaughter of children. After the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) stated: “I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences too. And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on." After the Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick identified the root causes: "We have 50 million abortions" along with violent video games and "We threw God out of school.” 

 

Essentially their argument is that the only way to stop gun violence (and other social ills) is for the U.S. to become a Christian theocracy.

 

I've heard this viewpoint for many years, and--alas--may have even espoused it back when I was a fundamentalist Christian. But if you think it through and apply even a modicum of logic, it doesn't hold up against the data. All we have to do is look at the rate of gun deaths in the nations of the world and compare it with the religious affiliations of those nation's populations to see that it's a specious correlation. 

 

Most nations track gun violence statistics, and the common measurement that is used is gun deaths per 100,000 people. This provides the rate of gun deaths (as opposed to simply the number of gun deaths, which would tend be greater in a nation with a very large population).

 

So, for example,

 

The U.S. has the 32nd-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world (out of 195 nations): 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019. That was more than eight times as high as the rate in Canada, which had 0.47 deaths per 100,000 people — and nearly 100 times higher than in the United Kingdom, which had 0.04 deaths per 100,000.

 

But when you look at the religious affiliations in these three countries, it breaks down like this:

 

U.S. - Christian 69.8%, none/atheist 22.4%, Jewish 1.9%, Muslim 0.9%, Buddhist 0.7%, Hindu 0.7%, other 1.8%.

 

Canada - Christian 67.2%, none/atheist 23.9%, Muslim 3.2%, Hindu 1.5%, Sikh 1.4%, Buddhist 1.1%, Jewish 1%, other 0.6%.

 

U.K. - Christian 59.5%, none/atheist 25.7%, Muslim 4.4%, Hindu 1.3%, other 2%, unspecified 7.2%.

 

"Christian" here, by the way, means a combination of Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Mormon, and all other varieties. The percentages of actual practicing/church-going Christians in all of these nations is probably much lower. But even if we stick with the “official” percentages, the UK has 10% fewer Christians and 3% more atheists, yet has 100 times lower the rate of deaths due to gun violence.

 

So if we apply the conservative Christian methodology here of correlating lack of Christian faith to gun violence, this data would point us in the opposite direction: that fewer Christians and more atheists equates to lower gun violence.

 

Now let's look at the ten nations with the absolute lowest rates of gun deaths in the world, and the religions followed by their populations:

 

1. Singapore (0.01 deaths per 100,000) - Buddhist 43%, Muslim 15%, Christian 15%, none/atheist 15%, Taoist 9%, Hindu 4%

2. Japan (0.02 deaths per 100,000) - Shintoist and Buddhist 84%, other/atheist 15.3%, Christian 0.7%

3. China (0.02 deaths per 100,000) - None/atheist 94%, Taoist/Buddhist/Christian 4%, Muslim 2%

4. South Korea (0.02 deaths per 100,000) - None/atheist 46%, Christian 26%, Buddhist 26%, Confucianist/other 2%

5. Oman (0.03 deaths per 100,000) - Muslim 85.9%, Christian 6.5%, Hindu 5.5%, Buddhist 0.8%, Jewish less than 0.1%.

6. United Kingdom (0.04 per 100,000) - Christian 59.5%, Muslim 4.4%, Hindu 1.3%, other 2%, unspecified 7.2%, none/atheist 25.7%

7. Indonesia (0.06 per 100,000) - Muslim 87.2%, Christian 9.9%, Hindu 1.7%, other 0.9% (includes Buddhist and Confucian), unspecified 0.4%

8. Iceland (0.06 per 100,000) - Christian 75.6%, Atheist/Humanist/None 22.43%, Heathen/Norse 1.64%, Buddhist 0.42%, Muslim 0.35%, Bahai 0.1%

9. Romania (0.07 per 100,000) - Christian 92.6%, Muslim 0.9%, none/atheist 0.2%, unspecified 6.3%

10. Norway (0.07 per 100,000) -Church of Norway (Evangelical Lutheran - official) 74.4%, other/none/atheist 22.5%Muslim 3.1%, Roman Catholic 3.1%

 

What you see actually is no discernible pattern regarding correlation between religion and gun violence. Some are majority Christian, some are majority Muslim, some are majority Buddhist, some are majority atheist (and one should remember, in the cases of Iceland and Norway, that although a majority are listed officially as Christian, most do not attend church, and they are, in fact, very secular nations).

 

Also, abortion is legal in most of these countries in varying degrees (but not Oman and only recently in South Korea).

 

Here’s what these countries (and many, many more) with the lowest rates of gun violence do have in common: laws that regulate access to guns. That is the common denominator among not just these ten nations, but among all nations that effectively reduce gun violence. These are facts.

 

There are 400 million guns in civilian hands in this U.S. It's just simple math. The more guns that are around, and the easier they are to obtain, the more people are going to use them, including in harmful ways. Add to that an increase in polarization and extremism, ginned up by irresponsible media pundits and politicians, and some people will act out, and they have easy access to incredibly destructive weapons when they do. Throw mental health into the mix and, if guns are readily available, they will come into play in mental health crisis situations (more likely in suicide, but also in homicide).

 

Again, we can clearly see that for a great many nations reducing access to guns reduces gun violence. In the U.S. we’ve seen that increasing access to guns has increased gun violence. Gun production by firearm manufacturers has tripled over the last couple of years. Gun purchases have reached record levels. Yet only 32% of Americans own guns. In other words, the people who own guns in the U.S. tend to own more than one, and often own lots of them. And guns nowadays tend to be capable of firing more rounds and firing at a faster rate than guns in the past. So more damage can be done in a shorter amount of time by a single gun. Yet there is minimal regulation. An 18 year old kid, like the Uvalde shooter, can legally buy semi-automatic assault-style rifles, high-capacity magazines, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, tactical body armor, etc. The man who recently murdered four people (including two doctors) at a Tulsa hospital legally purchased an AR-15 type semi-automatic rifle a little over an hour before his rampage.

 

Of course no one is arguing that violence can be completely eliminated. The reality is that humans always have and always will harm other humans. But, as we've all seen, guns are extremely efficient at harming humans quickly, in large numbers, and from a safe distance.

 

In the U.S., there is no practical purpose to having hundreds of millions of barely regulated guns scattered around. Even a nation such as Israel, that lives with constant threats of terrorist violence within its borders (and is the darling of conservative Christians), has very strict (and smart) gun control laws (https://www.timesofisrael.com/comparing-america-to.../). Israel, by the way, has a gun death rate of 0.68 per 100,000 (far below the U.S.), and is a secular nation where 65% of the population is atheist, and abortion is legal.