In the wake of the tragic events in Newtown, CT, a renewed debate about gun laws is forthcoming in the United States. With that in mind, the following is a look at the top ten gun exporting countries around the world, to see how the United States compares to them in that and other areas related to guns and gun violence. All of these numbers come together to paint a picture of a country with high ownership and production of guns, with high rates of death related to that ownership, and yet some of the laxest laws on the planet when it comes to regulating them.

Top Arms Exporter

When ranked among the top ten arms exporters, the United States is far and away in the lead in terms of sheer output. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States shipped off a total of $6.6 billion worth of arms in 2009, beating the next closest competitor, Russia, by over a billion dollars. Rounding out the list are Germany, France, the United Kingdom, China, Spain, Israel, the Netherlands and Italy.

The data combines both private sales from arms manufacturers and government authorized arms trades between states. For a better look at how the latter looks, and how the United States still outperforms all other countries, Google has an interactive look at where all these guns go.

Most Gun Owners Per Capita

Not only does the United States ship off the most guns in the world, its people own the most guns among the top ten exporters. The Small Arms Survey in 2007 pulled together a database of several countries’ gun ownership per 100 people, and found that an average of 88 guns per 100 people within the U.S. In comparison, the next highest country, France, had only 33 guns for every 100 citizens.

Most Gun Deaths Per 100K People

Rather than looking at the sheer number of deaths caused by firearms in the top ten exporters, a more accurate way to compare them is by gun deaths per 100,000 citizens. In that ranking, for those who break gun deaths out from their annual murder rate, the United States is again at the top of the list, this per the World Health Organization and the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.

The United States in 2009 had 3 gun deaths for every 100,000 people over the course of the year, completely eclipsing the next nearest country’s rate of .96, coming from Israel, by a wide margin. When you factor in the .243 rate of France, the second-highest gun owning country, the United States’ gun troubles seem even more problematic. Notable in this context, in the aftermath of mass shootings, other countries have tightened their laws accordingly and seen a drop in gun violence.

Second Highest Percentage Of Homicides With a Firearm

One of the few areas related to gun ownership and violence where the United States does not come in at the top among the biggest arms exporters is the percentage of homicides within the country carried out using a firearm. In that statistic, Italy holds the first position, with the United States in second. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and the Organization of American States, 60 percent of the murders in the U.S. in 2009 involved a firearm.

In the wake of yet another controversial stop on his campaign trip abroad, a host of international media criticized Mitt Romney’s positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as damaging to prospects for reviving the stalled peace process.

While in Jerusalem, Romney’s remarks must have been music to the ears of his hand-picked right-wing audience of donors and political figures. But he caused a stir with the Palestinians by putting their economic woes down to their “culture” and declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel (most of the world won’t do so because Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state).

Here’s a round-up of what some of the international media is saying about Romney’s trip to Jerusalem:

GERMANY: In an opinion piece for the centrist Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s biggest daily, Christian Wernicke wrote:

The trip to Israel may help Romney in the short term. In the long term, however, the Republican has done damage: The Middle East needs the United States as mediator. As such, the would-be president has already disqualified himself.

FRANCE: The French newspaper Le Monde noted that Romney broke with a policy upheld by successive U.S. governments for more than 60 years by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel:

(H)e delivered a speech declaring himself “very moved” to find himself Jerusalem, “the capital of Israel.”

This while the U.S. does not officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Their embassy, ​​like those of virtually all the countries represented in Israel, is in Tel Aviv.

AUSTRIA: The Vienna-based Kurier newspaper set the stage by mentioning the harsh British reaction to Romney’s visit to London and, in harsh terms, placed his Jerusalem comments in that context:

Now the next occasion of putting his foot in his mouth: on Sunday, the Republican called Jerusalem the “capital of Israel.”

UNITED KINGDOM: In a in opinion column for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, Hugo Rifkind wrote:

Mr. Romney’s behavior in Israel is… a throwback to a time when U.S. foreign policy considered the bulk of the Middle East to be irredeemably horrible; a great morass of messy “other” with which grown-up engagement was close to impossible. As a response to the patchwork of petty tyranny that the region used to be, this made some sense. Today, it makes none at all.

Perhaps the harshest opinion came here at home, where a New York Times editorial ripped Romney for his counter-productive pandering that does “no favors” for American interests:

Despite what Mr. Romney says, all American presidents have been pro-Israel, including Mr. Obama. But that doesn’t mean subcontracting American policy to Israeli leaders or donors. [... Romney's] policies would complicate America’s ability to act as a broker in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

How’s Romney handling the coverage given to him by the world’s media? Not well. Before leaving Poland to travel back Stateside, Romney told Fox News he blamed the media for all his stumbling blocks abroad.

In the late 1940s, Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously said that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” In recent years, adherence to the axiom has fallen by the wayside. In 2005, President Clinton criticized the sitting Bush administration in a Dubai speech. And President Obama delivered a 2008 speech to cheering throngs in Berlin during a presidential race. But Obama’s Berlin speech focused on policy issues and avoided criticizing his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain (AZ) or the waning Bush administration.

This weekend, however, the Romney campaign took politics overseas in a much more explicit fashion: dispatching two advisers to foreign publications amid an established one-on-one presidential race to heavily criticize President Obama by name and build their case that Mitt Romney should be president.

In one of the salvos against President Obama, Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard took to the pages of the German business magazine Handelsblatt to sharply criticize the administration’s stance on the European fiscal crisis. According to a translated portions of the article in the New York Times, Hubbard lambasted Obama’s “ignorance of the causes of the crisis and of a growth trend in the future,” calling the president “unwise.” After taking the president to task by name, Hubbard contrasted him with Romney:

Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican opponent, understands this very well and advises a gradual fiscal consolidation for the U.S.: structural reform to stimulate growth.

According to the Times, the Obama campaign already took a shot at Hubbard’s op-ed:

In a foreign news outlet, Governor Romney’s top economic adviser both discouraged essential steps that need to be taken to promote economic recovery and attempted to undermine America’s foreign policy abroad.

The second overseas assault on President Obama came from Romney foreign policy adviser Amb. Richard Williamson. Speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Williamson zeroed in on Obama’s Iran and Israel policies. “Under Barack Obama, our national security capabilities have decreased,” he said, blasting “President Obama’s feckless and ineffective leadership.” He went on:

What the Governor has tried to make clear is that one of the unfortunate results of the Obama foreign policy is our friends and allies, including Great Britain, Israel and others, have not had their interests taken into account, have not been consulted closely, and there isn’t a constructive working relationship.

The claims are baseless. Indeed, Romney and his advisers are the ones who last month publicly trashed Great Britain, its leaders, and other European allies. And Williamson’s claim that “there isn’t a constructive working relationship” with Israel belie a reality where Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu note that Obama “rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented,” and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Obama is an “extremely strong supporter of Israel in regard to its security” and that no one should “raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel.”

With direct political attacks being waged overseas, the 1940s and Vandenberg are clearly in the rearview. But perhaps at least the Romney campaign could do America — and the world — a favor by maintaining a modicum of honesty in their attacks on Obama launched from overseas.

This is part one of a two-part report on the American Enterprise Institute’s growing involvement with Islamophobic ideologues. Part two is here.

In a speech earlier this month, a scholar at an influential think tank and flagship of contemporary Washington conservatism, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), gave voice to one of the justifications for Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik‘s attacks, explaining that Breivik said “he had no other choice but to use violence” because his fringe views were “censored.” While accepting a prize this month from the German multimedia company Axel Springer, Somali-born Dutch AEI scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke on the “advocates of silence” — those she admonishes for purportedly stifling criticisms of radical Islamic extremism.

In the speech, flagged by the website Loonwatch, Hirsi Ali noted that she herself appeared in Breivik’s 1,500-word manifesto (Breivik reprinted a European right-wing article saying Hirsi Ali should win the Nobel Peace Prize). While she denounced Breivik’s views as an “abhorrant” form of “neo-fascism,” she then postulated that Breivik was driven to violence because his militant anti-multicultural views were not given a fair airing in the public discourse.

After speaking about how the “advocates of silence” repress discussion about radical Islamism, Hirsi Ali said:

Fourthly and finally, that one man who killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against political Islam in Europe and America – myself among them – but he does not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence. Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence.

Watch a clip of the speech:

Hirsi Ali’s exclamation that the “advocates of silence” stifle discourse so effectively that Breivik was driven last July to kill 77 people — 69 slaughtered at a summer youth camp — is contradicted even by her own speech. In closing, Hirsi Ali said, “The good news is that recently the leaders of established conservative parties in Europe have broken the pact of silence,” citing comments against multiculturalism by the leaders of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, Hirsi Ali has herself been a Dutch parliamentarian, a frequent contributor to mainstream U.S. and international publications, and author of a New York Times best-selling autobiography. Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders enjoys considerable success in Hirsi Ali’s own Netherlands. Views against multiculturalism don’t get censored, though some of the most bigoted ideologies are often driven to the margins in free societies.

Neither AEI nor Ayaan Hirsi Ali replied to requests for comments about her talk. But a public affairs official at AEI wrote to ThinkProgress, “AEI does not take institutional positions on policy issues. When our scholars speak, they speak for themselves.”

In her speech, Hirsi Ali said that “to speak out against radical Islamism is to be condemned as an Islamophobe.” But as detailed in the Center For American Progress’s report on Islamophobia, “Fear, Inc.,” the Islamophobe label applies not to those who rail against “radical Islam,” but rather against Islam as a whole. Not surprisingly, Hirsi Ali is herself in this latter category — yet another indication that Islamophobic views are not censored. In a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine, Hirsi Ali called for Islam to be “defeated.” The interviewer asked: “Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?” Hirsi Ali replied bluntly: “No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.”