Category: Gun violence

Gun Violence: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Frightening Facts

Polls say Americans’ overall support for gun control is tepid

Despite what you may be hearing on CNN and MSNBC or other left-leaning news organizations, recent polls indicate that Americans’ support for more gun control legislation nationally has been falling, has rarely topped 60%, and lately has dipped to 52%.  I’ll list the polls at the end of this post—three by Pew Research and two by Gallup.  These polls were taken before the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX. As in the past there will now surely be a surge in support for more and more effective gun controls—but if the past is any guide, the surge will subside and in a few months support for gun controls will flatten out again. Although a slight gain in support for more gun restrictions might occur, it can hardly be decisive legally due to our political paralysis.

What’s missing in most of these polls is a comparative breakdown by state and region.  Does high public support for stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of shooting deaths? Hard to tell. There’s a lot of data on gun deaths and shootings by state and region, but when it comes to public support for stricter gun laws the data are either missing or confusing.  One obstacle to doing so is that there is no one single metric by which to rank “support” because what gun control means in one location is different from what it means in another location: background checks, age requirements, license requirements, training requirements, red flag laws (and their level of enforcement), properties of the firearms themselves (e.g. semiautomatic vs fully automatic, rate of fire, accuracy, ammunition, size of magazines, etc.), can all be mixed in proportions that are not standardized.

Nevertheless, an attempt was made by “World Population Review” in which there is a table (scroll down to “Strictest Gun Laws by State”) comparing “Strictness Grade” and gun death rates, and using a single number to represent a group of measures that vary from state to state. In general, the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest gun death rates. Sure, say the liberals, duh. But that’s not the point, say Second Amendment zealots. The pro-gun counterargument is, that states with the strictest gun laws are the least “free.” Murders and suicides by guns are as Bill O’Reilly once said, “the cost of freedom.”

Continue reading “Gun Violence: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Frightening Facts”

Whose Children Are Getting Shot?

NOTE: THIS POST IS CURRENTLY INCOMPLETE (AS OF FEB. 28). I POSTED IT BEFORE FINISHING IT,  BUT I DID NOT WANT TO TAKE IT DOWN.  PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! 🙂

Mass school shootings – much less than half the story of gun deaths of children in the U.S.

As tragic as the most recent school shooting in Parkland was, the debate over assault weapons, bump stocks, and high capacity magazines is missing the much broader problem of gun deaths in the U.S.

Of course every possible effort should be made to stop mass school shootings. But the fact is that mass school shootings, on average, account for only 0.9% of child deaths by firearms in the U.S.

Here’s how it plays out in the U.S., for children 1-17 years old, by the numbers:
 –  child deaths by firearms, annually (2012-2014) : 1,297*
–  child deaths by suicide, annually: (2012-2014):  492
– child deaths by homicide, annually: (2012 – 2014) : 687
– child deaths by accident, annually: (2012 – 2014): 77
– child deaths by law enforcement, or undetermined,           annually:  2012-2014):  41
–  child deaths by mass school shootings, annually (2012-2017):  12**

Therefore, to figure out how and why all these kids are getting gunned down, we have to look elsewhere than mass school shootings.

Continue reading “Whose Children Are Getting Shot?”

What’s Missing in the Gun Debate – What Works and What Doesn’t

Bad assumptions: myths and mistaken intuition

Some of what you may believe about gun violence is probably wrong. I refer first to an op-ed that appeared in the October 6, 2017, Washington Post, entitled “Five myths about gun violence.”  Five Myths about Gun Violence

In case you are kept out of the Post by a paywall, the Five Myths are:
(1) Gun violence in the U.S. is at an all-time high. (The peak was almost twice as high in 1993.)
(2) Background checks save lives. (What seems intuitively obvious fails, partially as a result of an inconsistent system. Requirements for licensing of purchasers might turn this around, but these are lacking or seldom enforced.) 
(3) Mental illness is behind most gun violence (Research indicates that only about 4% of violence against others [presumably gun violence as a subset] is caused by symptoms of serious mental illnesses.)
(4) Right-to-carry laws decrease crime. (As of October 2017, no armed civilians had halted a mass shooting. “Unarmed civilians are more than 20 times as likely to end a mass shooting than are armed civilians.”)
(5) Mass shootings are random.

Continue reading “What’s Missing in the Gun Debate – What Works and What Doesn’t”