Running the numbers

January 15, 2012 by
Filed under: Gun Death? 

Our opponents on the anti-defense side of the aisle like to point to the metric of “Gun Deaths” as a problem that must be addressed by banning firearms from the hands of private citizens.  How big a problem is “Gun Death”, anyway?

I did some cracking into the numbers that the CDC provides.  All of this data is available through their WISQUARS system, and the numbers are current as of the date of this post.  I recorded the total number of deaths for each year, then pulled three specific numbers:

  1. The number of homicides committed with a firearm.
  2. The number of suicides committed with a firearm.
  3. The number of accidental deaths from a firearm.

Those numbers, when added, give us the number of “gun deaths” per year.  We can compare this number with the total number of deaths, and it gives us a sense of how big a problem this really is.  First the raw data:

 

Gun Deaths 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001
Homicide 12,632 12,791 12,352 11,624 11,920 11,829 11,348
Suicide 17,352 16,883 17,002 16,750 16,907 17,108 16,869
Accidental 613 642 789 649 730 762 802
Total “Gun Deaths” 30,597 30,316 30,143 29,023 29,557 29,699 29,019
Total Deaths 2,423,712 2,426,264 2,448,017 2,397,615 2,448,288 2,443,387 2,416,425
Total Homicide/Accidents 13,245 13,433 13,141 12,273 12,650 12,591 12,150
Total Deaths 2,423,712 2,426,264 2,448,017 2,397,615 2,448,288 2,443,387 2,416,425
% Gun Death 1.26% 1.25% 1.23% 1.21% 1.21% 1.22% 1.20%
%HOM/ACC 0.55% 0.55% 0.54% 0.51% 0.52% 0.52% 0.50%

As you can see, “gun deaths” are consistently about 1.2% of all deaths in a given year. Excluding suicides, we get “unintended gun deaths” at about 0.5% of all deaths in the country. (After all, someone who uses a firearm to kill themselves is intending the outcome of their own death.) Let’s look at that graphically:

Maybe we should ring a bell for something else…

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Comments

One Comment on Running the numbers

  1. Linoge on Mon, 16th Jan 2012 5:34 pm

    2. And the important thing to remember is that throughout that window, somewhere between 2 million and 4 million firearms were produced and sold here in the United States… EACH YEAR. If firearms actually caused firearm-related deaths, would we not see some kind of increase in proportion to the number of firearms, or, at least, an increase at all?

    Whoops. There I go applying logic to the scenario again…

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