Much, much smaller numbers.

The US has about 10x the population of Canada.
Based on numbers from 2008, the US also has about 45-50x the number of firearms related deaths.

Unless the customer site is a navy hospital, you are in the ER, and a general is watching over your shoulder. That was the longest 16 hours of my life.

Patents inherently aren't evil. If I invent a machine to stop it from snowing on my driveway (yes, I'm in Canada :P), I don't want some other company to rip apart my machine and start building their own without having to go through the R&D that I went through. They don't have all of that invested money to make back, and so they sell it for 1/2 the price that I'm selling it for. Patents protect me from this.

If, however, I think of a machine to stop it from snowing on my driveway, patent it, and never develop the product, then that's evil. This is what NTP has done in this case.