Gun Numbers

Some numbers on guns. These numbers are just that: Numbers. They are neither observations nor explanations. There is a wonderful short story by Borges where the weapon has a spirit.

That is a lovely image but in the real world there are probably other factors. But without doubt, any analysis and decision about this problem will be made by emotions.
 

There are about 300 million firearms in the U.S., 75 million gun owners, and about 3-5 deadly mass shooters each year. That means 0.000006% of gun owners each year are mass shooters.

With the toughest gun laws in the nation, Chicago saw homicides jump to 513 in 2012, a 15% hike in a single year. The city’s murder rate is 15.65 per 100,000 people, compared with 4.5 for the Midwest, and 5.6 for Illinois.

One is approximately twelve times more likely to die from farm machinery than from a mass shooting.

Last year, the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported that participation by women increased both in target shooting (46.5%) and hunting (36.6%) over the past decade. Also, 61% of firearm retailers responding to a NSSF survey reported an increase in female customers. A 2009 NSSF survey indicated that the number of women purchasing guns for personal defense increased 83 percent.

31 percent of adults reporting having a firearm in their household in 2014. That is 17 percentage points below the peak gun ownership from 1977 to 1980.

Fifty-five percent of the homicide victims were black, far beyond their 13 percent share of the population.

While blacks are significantly more likely than whites to be gun homicide victims, blacks are only about half as likely as whites to have a firearm in their home (41% vs. 19%).

One is  roughly three times more likely to die from lawnmowers than from a mass shooting.

Since at least 1950, all but two public mass shootings in America have taken place where general citizens are banned from carrying guns.

According to Pew, gun-related homicides in the late 2000s were “equal to those not seen since the early 1960s.” Yet their survey found that 56 percent believed gun-related crime is higher, 26 percent believed it stayed about the same, and 6 percent didn’t know.  Only 12 percent of those polled thought it was lower.
The Pew survey found that while women and elderly were actually less likely to become crime victims, they were more likely to believe gun crime had increased in recent years.

More than twice as many people are murdered by people with their hands and feet than by rifles or shotguns each year, according to FBI Crime Statistics.

Blunt objects kill far more than either rifles or shotguns.

"Less than half of Americans, 47%, say they favor stricter laws covering the sale of firearms, similar to views found last year," Gallup says. "But this percentage is significantly below the 58% recorded in 2012 after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, spurred a nationwide debate about the possibility of more stringent gun control laws. Thirty-eight percent of Americans say these laws should be kept as they are now, and 14% say they should be made less strict."

Knives kill over six times as many people as either rifles or shotguns. 

FBI Crime Statistics show that all rifles combined — “assault rifles,” hunting rifles, all rifles — account for 250 firearms homicides per year. That is fewer than 2% of all homicides each year. By comparison, handguns account for nine times as many murders as all other firearms combined.

Corrected for population, the U.S. is eleventh in the world in terms of death rate from mass shootings per year.

According to DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011. During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, a whopping 69 percent.

In an average month, 50 women are shot to death by intimate partners in the U.S..

Corrected for population, the U.S. drops from the nation with the ‘most mass shootings in the world’ to the twelfth highest.