The truth about gun deaths: numbers and actual solutionsWhen the President went on television after the Oregon college mass shooting he issued a challenge to the media. He asked them to show America the number of gun deaths as compared to the number of terrorism related deaths since the 9/11 attacks. The media dutifully complied and soon every network, newspaper and magazine was putting up startling graphics, such as this one tweeted by CNN.
These graphics and figures were almost uniformly followed by comments about the mass shooting and the “pressing need†for background checks and other gun control laws. Unfortunately, all of these numbers flashing around were dishonestly offered up with no context or details. As it turns out, however, the real numbers are available from a variety of sources including the FBI and the CDC, among others, so let’s take a look at them. It takes federal agencies a long time to compile and publish their statistics, so the last full set of data we have is from 2011 and the figures can shed a lot of light on exactly how mendacious gun control advocates are being with these studies.
First of all, look at the number of gun deaths on that chart from 2011. It’s 32,351. That’s a lot of gun deaths to be sure. So that’s the total number of murders by gun owners, right? The answer is not only Hell No, but it’s not even remotely close. It’s true that this figure is close to the total number of human lives ended in incidents involving a gun, but that’s all incidents. So how did those deaths happen?
Straight from the CDC where most of the media is drawing their numbers (while not as good of a source as the FBI or the Justice Department) we can find out that of those 32,352 gun deaths, 21,175 of them were suicides. That leaves us with 11,177 deaths to account for. But as it turns out, the FBI records that 8,583 deaths were murders of various sorts involving guns of all types. The remaining roughly 2,500 were accounted for by accidents and unintentional injuries. These include hunting accidents, toddlers getting hold of unsecured weapons and shooting somebody or just plain idiots who proved Darwin right.
Before we move on, those FBI numbers deserve a closer look for a moment since we’re on the subject. What sorts of guns are used in actual crimes? I bring this up because each mass shooting elicits renewed calls for an “assault weapons†ban on guns like the AR-15 style rifle. Are those popular in crimes? Check out the figures from the FBI report.
Take a good look at those numbers. Of the actual 8,583 gun murders committed in 2011, 323 were committed with “rifles.†And that’s all rifles, including bolt action, deer hunting rifles and all the rest. The number committed with so called “assault rifles†were a fraction of that. When you ask how dangerous those rifles are, compare that to nearly 1,700 who were stabbed as well as nearly 500 murdered with blunt objects and and more than 700 beaten to death by somebody with their bare hands. Enough said on that topic.
So we’re down to 8,583 intentional killings using guns. That’s still one heck of a lot of bodies, and surely enough to justify new background checks and other restrictions on legal gun purchases, right? Again… not even close. The Justice Department has been studying the question of legal vs. illegal sources of guns used in crimes for decades, going back to this study issued in the early nineties. They admit that the numbers are simply too hard to track for us to pin down exact figures, but the trends are steady over the years. The vast majority of guns used in crimes were gotten through illegal means outside the legal purchase regimen followed by law abiding gun owners. Roughly one quarter of inmates convicted of gun crimes admitted to having stolen a gun in that study. For the ones that weren’t stolen directly, another 2004 study showed that 40% of convicts bought their guns on the black market and another 37% got them through the “gray market†in various illegal methods.
In fact, one study after another has shown that legally purchased weapons which followed all the normal firearms transfer rules accounted for somewhere between six and eight percent of all murders. And the majority of those were domestic violence incidents, violence between family members, crimes of passion and, yes… murders committed by the insane. But let’s give the gun grabbers the benefit of the doubt, round it up and say that ten percent were committed with legally purchases guns. That works out to around 850.
850 is too many people, but it’s a far cry from more than 32,000 per year.
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