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Why are we limiting to firearm-related deaths? Within hours of the event in CT, there was another mass attack at a school in China - that one by knife, wounding twenty or so.

While guns may have increased the severity of the damage, the lack of a gun did little to stop a similar event from taking place. People that want to do harm to others will find a way, and while there's something to be said for trying to lessen how much damage they can do, that seems to be a poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease.

Put another way: let's look at the overall violent crime rates by country instead. Here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... US ranks at 4.2/100k

I'd also like to point out your selective data pull is very misleading (whether it was intentional or not I don't know; I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). Of those 9 deaths per 100k, 5.75 are suicides and 0.27 are unintentional; only 2.98 were murders (so we have nearly 75% of our murders by gun, but overall a quite low murder rate compared to over a dozen countries at 30+/100k and four over 50). Also from missing from your quote - the US is #12 in terms of firearm deaths per capita, not #1 as your data implies.

The only data that is really relevant to gun control arguments are murders that would not have been possible without a gun and (probably more relevant) accidental gun deaths. Anyone sufficiently determined to kill themselves will find any number of ways, so that's almost completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Precisely: the attack in china wounded twenty. As of this writing none were killed. The "severity of the damage" is a highly relevant measure, not something to dismiss.

"...poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease". Sorry, the symptoms (i.e. lots of people dead) are the problem here.

My data pull was primarily for the countries mentioned earlier, I added some others I find relevant because I have experience living there (never been to Finland). I did not imply the US was #1, the extract was obviously a very short one.

The Wikipedia page you cite tells essentially the same story as the Washington Post article: of the OECD countries, the US is by far the most violent, more than 4x more than Germany, for example. Take a look at the countries surrounding the US in the statistic! If you're not embarrassed, you're not paying attention.

The "would not have been possible without a gun" argument is specious, as is "anyone sufficiently determined" argument for suicides: you are assuming that anyone with a suicide attempt is sufficiently determined, as is someone wanting to kill someone. This is a fallacy, both logically and from what the data show.

Not being able to stop everyone is no excuse for not even trying to stop those that can be stopped (or reducing the damage...heck if no-one gut hurt, would the "rampage" even be a problem??)

In 2010 a similar attack occurred in China, and over twenty were killed.
Do you mean this series of attacks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–2...

If Wikipedia is correct, this was a whole series of attacks, sometimes with multiple assailants, with each attack having far fewer fatalities, so the point about reducing the damage stands.

Still awful.

Yes- point taken. Also here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/asia/14china.html
I believe we were ignoring the severity of the damage because we were attempting to investigate what mental factors went into making people decide to go on killing sprees. How much damage they did ultimately doesn't affect the factors that led them to decided to make the attempt.
It seems that that data gives statistics for a single year, and not the same year for each country. While the annual gun-related death rate may be somewhat stable for the U.S., I would guess it varies a lot from year to year in smaller countries depending on whether there was a major incident that year or not. I'd want to look across a similar-size population (e.g. all of EU) and (say) a 10 year span, and then calculate #deaths/year/1,000 population
The Wapo article links to a graph that has the "deaths due to assault" (not limited to guns) for OECD countries: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2012/07/20/america-...

Luxembourg (total population 1/2 million) has the higher variance you mention, the rest of are pretty stable.