I find it hardly likely that it would be lower given you would have to factor in accidental death, suicide, murders within gun owning families, etc, and on the other side there are just the situations where owning a gun actually stopped you being shot, which are obviously much much less and often end up with the other gun owner shot, so effectively reducing that number still further. It seems fairly obvious that proximity to a deadly item increases the chance of being killed by it.
That exact trick is used for broader stats about 'gun violence'. More than half of the deaths counted as 'gun violence' are suicides, not murders.
Counting suicides as gun violence is convenient for a narrative, because areas with friendlier gun laws, and thus, more guns per capita, tend to have more suicides by gun. It's a common hack move to plot those two numbers and show a correlation.
Exactly. No one on the pro-gun control side looks too closely at the statistics because they don't like what they see. Namely that the odds of someone who isn't suicidal and who isn't involved in criminal activity dying from a gunshot wound are about the same as the odds of being hit by a wayward meteor.
"Gun deaths" always seems like a silly metric to me. Who cares if you're killed with a gun instead of a knife or baseball bat or whatever else? Why not just compare murder rates?
When gun violence decreases, fatalities decrease. A violent attack without a gun is less like to result in fatalities. A suicide attempt without a gun is less likely to result in a fatality, and so on.
It might make it easier, but that isn't evidence to suggest it makes people more likely to do it. A sufficiently motivated person could kill someone with any number of means. You still haven't tied more guns to more terrorist attacks.
2/3 of the people killed by guns were suicides. So, in fact, the risk is about 1/3 of what you suggest. And most of those deaths are gang violence related, so if you're not involved in gangs, the risk is minimal.
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, I would have assumed the chances of dying by gun assault was even lower. How was the probability of dying from a gun assault calculated? With car accidents you can generally assume random distribution, but you have to do some math with gun statistics before you can assume random distribution (remove suicides, remove gang-related deaths, etc.)
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