THE TOLL

SINCE the turn of the century, nearly 800,000 U.S. citizens have been killed by privately owned guns, v. 630,768 Americans killed in all the nation's wars.

The U.S. suffered more than 20,000 gun fatalities last year, including 7,000 murders and homicides, 3,000 accidental deaths and 10,000 suicides. Another 100,000 were wounded by gunfire.

Ten nations surpass the U.S. in overall homicide rates, all of them Latin lands, where violence is stimulated by the code of machismo. But with a rate of 5.6 homicides per 100,000, the U.S. has the dubious distinction of outpacing, by far, all other industrialized nations which have stringent gun laws. This is true especially in gun deaths. In 1962, there were 29 murders by gunfire in all of England and Wales (with one-fourth the U.S. population), 37 in Japan (with one-half the population) and 4,954 in the U.S. Out of 400,000 criminals arrested in England and Wales over a recent three-year period, only 159 were carrying guns.

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