"The Washington Post is notoriously anti-gun. It is remarkable to see a Post fact-checker point out Obama's misstatements about guns."
If you visit the article, they subsequently softened their stance on a couple of those points with some
extremely talented backwards bending (and water carrying). "He was talking out his backside; he was referencing obscure facets of laws being proposed in fly-over states, obscure FDA studies on food availability, and a specific economic report that conveniently fails to include two industrialized nations whose crime rates dwarf ours*"
The Post is not anti-gun so much as
extremely friendly to the Obama administration (a good half the articles literally parrot the very keywords of the press secretary on any given day; it's pretty shameful, actually). I honestly have no idea why this article made it to publishing; it's very uncharacteristic of them to criticize any activity of the administration. The 'scoop' factor of those laughable quotes must have trumped their political sensibilities, I figure.
"The USA has a very high rate, much higher than similar counties with similar standard of living and GDP per capita"
I suspect the USA also has a much higher standard of living
standard deviation than a lot of countries. Since crime increases exponentially with poverty, the shift of the average GDP from our depressed areas corresponds to a highly amplified crime effect that swings the crime rate disproportionately.
TCB
*they include New Zealand, Switzerland, and Luxembourg; I don't think the word "industrialized" means what they think it means. It refers to a nation with a dominant, thriving industrial economy; not one who has successfully purged/quelled/controlled its more unruly social elements. Brazil is hardly unindustrialized. Likewise, a nation whose primary business is banking, tourism, or sheep ranching is not what I'd think of as "industrialized," even if they do have some portion of industry in their economy. We're supposed to believe New Zealand is more industrialized than Brazil?
The US isn't nearly as post-industrial as many of the nations on that list, so once again we're at apples/oranges (that's assuming GDP is an indicator of social equity in the first place --it's not)