> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.
I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.
As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.
> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out.
I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun.
> As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
You're right that, among untimely deaths, gun murders move up the ranking if you're looking at young people. But this misses the main thing, which is that untimely deaths of any kind are super rare among young people, even rarer than overall. Why should we care if gun murders make up 50% of untimely deaths among young people if the likelihood of untimely death is sufficiently low? Your line of reasoning seems to indicate a 10% chance of untimely death with 1 percentage point of that being gun murder is preferable to a 1% chance of untimely death with 0.5 percentage points of that being gun murder.
As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing. It's like the classic "The U.S. is [embarassingly] #44 in math achievement". This means nothing if the top 80 countries are tightly clustered around 98 math achievement points.
> But preventing gun deaths is important too.
My point is that it isn't important. There are much, much bigger fish to fry from a public health perspective. The marginal benefit of throwing one dollar at "gun violence" is << the marginal benefit of throwing that same buck at something like trying to get construction workers to wear proper safety harnesses.
> not every town in the US has high rates of gun violence
Every town in the US has a high rate of gun violence if you compare it to the rest of the developed world. America's overall homicide rate is 7x that of other high-income OECD nations, and gun homicides are twenty five times higher. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551975/
"Ninety percent of women, 91% of children aged 0 to 14 years, 92% of youth aged 15 to 24 years, and 82% of all people killed by firearms were from the United States."
> Gun violence is really quite high in every state and every major city in the US. Mostly we don't think about it.
That really isn’t true though. There is huge variation between states and cities in the USA; eg California has much less gun violence than Wyoming, and LA is a lot more safer than St. Louis.
> Shootings ... are a very small problem compared to things like ... car crashes, and tiktok.
That's an interesting claim. Perhaps you didn't know that "Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24" according to [1].
I suppose that statistic might include gun suicides and gun accidents, which (under an extremely contrived definition) don't count as "shootings", but that still misses the point that sensible governments have successfully reduced car accident deaths by tightening regulations related to vehicle ownership and licensing, whereas America is notably bad at doing so for guns, and is paying the price for that failure with the blood of its children.
If you could provide a statistic for the number of annual US deaths due to TikTok, I'd be interested to compare that to shooting deaths too.
> The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.
Homicides are indeed down, and that includes firearm homicides as well. When people mention any recent rise in firearm deaths, what they are are really saying is that firearm suicides are on the rise.
As for prevalence, it's not as uneven as you would think.
>In one study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the United States actually ranked 66th among other world nations when it came to the frequency mass public shootings per capita.
>And when just comparing European countries with the United States and Canada, the U.S. ranked 12th in a comparative study between 2009-2015.
> Depending on how finely you split the other causes, anything could be the "leading cause of death".
In my country there are usually zero gun deaths among children (0-17) (usually here means that they do exist, but are so rare that I think the last one was in 2009)
No matter how you fine tune your stats, gun deaths will never be a leading cause for them, while In 2017, nine children and teens were killed with guns each day in America — one every 2 hours and 34 minutes ...
> On average, 91 Americans are killed and more than 200 injured with guns every day.
How many of these are suicides, accidents, or gang violence? I ask because you quoted one paragraph which starts by talking specifically about mass shootings, but then generalizes to a fact that is almost certainly 99%+ incidents that are always excluded (suicide, accidents, gang violence, etc).
> In fact, way, more KSI from car accidents than even gun related homicide in the US. I hadn't realized that!
Guns get an outsized portion of air time on most media. Especially crimes committed by legal weapons against white people. If all gun crimes were covered equally you would hears a lot more about gang violence and illegal weapons.
> Deaths by gun related homicide in UK - 200. In US - 20000. (Both numbers pale in comparison to motor vehicle deaths, but there are a lot more in the US. Probably to be expected as there is stringent firearm control in the UK.)
I'd be curious to see the difference between gun homicides and homicides. The UK has a huge knife crime problem.
> I'm thinking overdoses is a major contributor. It's the only way to get to millions in less than 10 years. Car accidents, maybe, but honestly it's not that much compared to the number of young people who die every year. Ditto, with gun related homicide, which is even less than car accidents.
Overdoses and drug related deaths. Drug addiction will shorten a person's lifespan by decades.
> "For example, the large majority of firearms deaths fall into one of two categories. The first is gang violence..."
that's incorrect. accidental shootings and suicide are major categories, while intentional homicides, of which "gang violence" is a subset, is pretty low on the list.
That's a meaningless stat. The point of my Chicago stat is that vast majority of the shootings are coming from gang members. A gang member shooting another gang member isn't a relevant stat. And shootings in self defence is one of the purposes of owning a gun (though not what the 2A is only for).
That's like saying my daughter would be safer to live in my home country India where she may not get shot but she may get raped late at night. Or like saying Afghanistan is safer somehow?
Estimated 800,000 to 2.45 million defensive uses of firearms per year in 1993 national survey.
Another 2008 study by National Academy of Sciences showed 500,000 to more than 3 million "Defensive Use of Guns". Simply having the gun on your or brandishing it prevented crimes from happening. This was in 2008. That numbers is even higher now.
Page 15 of the study talks about the defensive use part. You can download the PDF by using the "guest" option and entering any random email (doesn't have to be real). Another related source:
> "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008."
> "In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU) in four to six states. Analysis of the raw data allows the estimation of the prevalence of DGU for those areas. Estimates based on CDC’s surveys confirm estimates for the same sets of states based on data from the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (Kleck and Gertz 1995). Extrapolated to the U.S. as a whole CDC’s survey data imply that defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. CDC has never reported these results."
> "One CDC official in the 1990s openly told the Washington Post that his goal was to create a public perception of gun ownership as something “dirty, deadly — and banned.” Given that history, I can’t dismiss Kleck’s critique."
How do you propose these people - wives/daughters/elderly/handicapped/living close to cartels/over 800K-3 million defensive uses should defend themselves?
Also, U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households, something which is well known for kids to grow up into criminals:
> The thing about statistics is that they have causes. More people having guns causes more criminals to be shot (or, better yet, deterred), but also more accidents.
Actually, people tend to more often die of homicide if they own a gun.
> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning
I think if you look at gun deaths and suicide you're going to have significant autocorrelation. 60% of gun deaths are suicide, so the data is baked in. But I have another correlation that may be more fruitful and interesting. It isn't 1 to 1, but there is significant overlap with (per capita normalized) overdoses[0] and gun death rates[1]. We'd have to dig deeper, but I think it wouldn't be surprising to find that rates of gun suicide and overdoses has many similar root causal factors. The north east seems to be the biggest mismatch
> Almost all gun violence is international warfare.
Unlikely. Less than 100K die in war annually, but that isn't only from gun violence. Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs. In 2020, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. And more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined.[1] It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US.[2] 67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise.[3]
> We hear a lot of banter from the “anti-gun” media that these problems are gun problems, and they’ve concocted this “gun deaths” number in order to lump these into the same problem and gloss over the differences. But if the problem were “guns,” then the hot spots on the suicide map and the hot spots on the homicide map would coincide, and would be related to gun ownership rates. There are only a few places where they overlap. Most of the hot zones for suicide have low homicide rates, and most of the hot zones for homicide have low suicide rates. The difference is stark. Let’s zoom in.
> This is almost universally due to gang activity and not the kids picking up weapons from friends and family and shooting themselves or others.
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Research [1] looking at data from a few years back (before firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the US) found:
Firearm deaths in children were 53% homicide, 38% suicide, 6% unintentional.
Of homicides in older children (13-17) the leading circumstances were argument (40%), precipitated by another crime (31%), and gang related (21%.)
>Guns… most of those are suicides, and that stat is uniquely American in terms of developed countries.
That seemed unbelievable to me, so I had to do some checking. The CDC[0] put 48k suicides in 2021, and attributed 55% to guns. Leaving us with 26.4k suicide gun deaths. While still a large number, there are still a significant portion of GP's 48k gun deaths which were not self inflected.
I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.
As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
[1]: 6.4k murder victims in 2019 from handguns, 3.3k from unspecified firearms, 1.5k from knives or cutting instruments, all other causes below 1k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
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