It's a very misleading chart, Bart, and if you don't know that you should. I suspect you do. The most obvious error is that the chart doesn't deal with murders. It deals with "gun deaths," deliberately implying that gun deaths are murders. To have any meaning you'd have to remove suicides from the chart, along with proper self-defense deaths, plus a few other categories I haven't time at the moment to research.
So how DO people in Netherlands commit suicide? Knives? Poison?
True story.
Friend's quite overweight brother had been having problems with diabetes, high blood pressure, fatigue, depression, and number of other side effects from all the medications he's been ingesting. Finally, his daughter talked some sense into him, got him on a healthy diet, with which he complied, he lost some weight and his health normalized enough, so that he was able to stop insuline injections. Unfortunately, after six months or so, he fell back into the old groove, and had to resort to taking the old medications, including the insuline injections. When his daughter saw him again and asked why did he stop his diet, his answer was "It's easier to get the shots". Sadly, the shots were not enough to cure the illness and he felt so rotten, that he eventually committed a suicide using a handgun.
Two more points:
- The poor fellow resided in Canada, where gun laws are quite strict, but he managed to buy a handgun illegally. So often, even in a country with strict gun laws, whover wants a gun, can find ways to get one.
- Even more importantly, if he had continued eating more carots and brocoli and stayed on the health diet, he wouldn't have relapsed into serious diabetes and depression, consequently wouldn't have purchased the revolver and he might have been still alive. Which leads to a conclusion that also many of the shooting criminals might be not eating properly.
