Bowling for gun deaths

Recently decided to watch Bowling for Columbine again "inspired" by the latest disaster in the US of a three-year old shooting a baby in the head. 



Cory Doctorow also reposted an article from Boing Boing from 2003 wherein Michael Moore tries to defend himself against the gun lobby's attacks on his film - archive.org version

I've just got to the bit in the film, about 50 minutes in, where he describes the gun deaths around the world and wanted to see if things had got better or worse in the 13 years since the film was released. My figures came from Wikipedia, as so many things do, and I cross-matched the numbers from that page with requests to Google saying "France population 2009" and so on.

My figures are not very accurate. Most of the time I've rounded up in the decimal point was more than .6, but I didn't want to make the figures worse than they are; I just wanted a rough idea.

It seems things are getting worse. For each country, I put the deaths reported in Bowling for Columbine, then the total deaths reported on Wikipedia. Those deaths are per 100,000 of the population so I just took the millions value for population, added a zero and multiplied by the deaths reported. Please let me know if my maths is wrong.

Gun deaths

Germany
2001: 381
2010: 1.24 82 = 1,017

France
2001: 255
2009: 3.01 65 = 1,956

Canada
2001: 365
07-11: 2.22 35 = 777

UK
2001: 68
2010: 0.25 63 = 157

Australia
2001: 65
2011 0.86 22 = 189

Japan
2001: 39
2008: 0.06 128 = 77

US
2001: 11,127
2011: 10.3 312 = 32,136

To make it clear:
For France's figures for 2009 you get "2009: 3.01 65 = 1,956"
This means 3.01 deaths by gun fire per 100,000 people. France's population in 2009 was listed as roughly 65 million, so I multiplied 3.01 by 650 (adding the zero to make the 3.01 number pertinent to millions), which gives a depressing 1,956 deaths by gunfire in my extrapolation.

What has depressed me further here is look at the increase in less than 15 years:

Germany 2.67x
France 7.67x (!)
Canada 2.12x
UK 2.3x
Australia 2.9x
Japan 1.97x
US 2.89x

Getting a DSi

I went into GAME today and for the first time ever, took them up on their trade-in policy that has never seemed very generous before to get a new Nintendo DSi in exchange for my old DS Lite (the one Mark bought me as it happens) and two games (since my selection is fairly widespread, one of my games wasn't accepted since it was American, and the fact that the power supply for the DSLite is UK was a no-go either). I will post a review on here once I have it, but two things have got me particularly excited by the new machine. The first is the browser. Obviously, it's on a DS! I don't expect it to be like Fx3 on my PC, but it will be handy for looking up films on IMDB or checking my mail (not replying!). It might be possible to do some posts for the blog on here with it, which interests me (although they will be by necessity fairly short). The first thing that really excites me is to do with the browser actually. Since the DSi has an SD card slot it means that I may be able to use it as my ebook reader - perhaps Mobipocket will see this as a big market and make a version for the DSi downloadable to the machine... The second big opportunity I see with it is the camera. I don't see any QR code scanner software available for it right now, but I don't doubt it will swiftly come.

New TV

Finally we got ourselves a new TV. We're sticking with Philips since our old set has done us proud for ten years. It's a 37" 1080p device catchily titled the Philips 37PFL5603H. I've downloaded the current firmware upgrade (bizarre, eh? How times change that we can upgrade our tellies!). The only fly in the ointment is that our local Intermarché is proposing a similar Philips 42" set for the same money and with a bunch back on our fidelity card. However, two strikes against it. 1, 42" is really too big for the distance we're playing with and 2, it doesn't have an HD tuner for the French equivalent of Freeview - TNT. I think I'm happy with this set. It's purty and there's an actual power switch to reduce the standby consumption of electricity to, well, 0w. Plus there's a chance I won't even need to reprogram the remote since it's a successor to the Philips TV we already have, and so the remote commands are likely to be similar enough.

I shall review it once it's here tomorrow night.