America’s unique gun violence problem, explained in 16 maps and charts

[homersapien 11,353]

In the developed world, these levels of gun violence are a uniquely American problem. Here’s why.

By German Lopez

After mass shootings in Odessa and Midland, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama, this weekend, Americans are confronting the country’s unique relationship with guns.

America is certainly an exceptional country when it comes to firearms. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But the relationship is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most homicidal — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms.

These maps and charts show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.

1) America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly 16 times as many as Germany

Javier Zarracina/Vox

This chart, compiled using United Nations data collected by Simon Rogers for the Guardian, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides. Why? Extensive reviews of the research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.

2) America has more guns than people

Small Arms Survey

Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.

3) There have been more than 2,000 mass shootings since Sandy Hook

Kavya Sukumar/Vox

In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been more than 2,000 mass shootings.

The number comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which hosts a database that has tracked mass shootings since 2013. But since some shootings go unreported, the database is likely missing some, as well as the details of some of the events.

The tracker uses a fairly broad definition of “mass shooting”: It includes not just shootings in which four or more people were murdered, but shootings in which four or more people were shot at all (excluding the shooter).

Even under this broad definition, it’s worth noting that mass shootings make up less than 2 percent portion of America’s firearm deaths, which totaled nearly 40,000 in 2017 alone.

4) On average, there is around one mass shooting for each day in America

Christopher Ingraham/Washington Post

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, supporters of gun rights often argue that it’s inappropriate to bring up political debates about gun control in the aftermath of a tragedy.

But if this argument is followed to its logical end, then it will just about never be the right time to discuss gun control, as Christopher Ingraham pointed out at the Washington Post. Under the broader definition of mass shootings, America has around one mass shooting a day. So if lawmakers are forced to wait for a time when there isn’t a mass shooting to talk gun control, they could find themselves waiting for a very long time.

5) States with more guns have more gun deaths

Mother Jones

Using data from a study in Injury Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones put together the chart above that shows states with more guns tend to have far more gun deaths, including homicides and suicides. This has been found across the empirical research: “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.

Read more in Mother Jones’s “10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down.”

6) It’s not just the US: Developed countries with more guns also have more gun deaths

Javier Zarracina/Vox

7) America is an outlier when it comes to gun deaths, but not overall crime

It would be one thing if the US happened to have more crime than other nations, but the existing data shows that not to be the case. America is only an outlier when it comes to homicides and, specifically, gun violence, according to data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University.

As Zack Beauchamp explained for Vox, a breakthrough analysis in the 1990s by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”

This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.

😎 States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths

Zara Matheson/Martin Prosperity Institute

When economist Richard Florida took a look at gun deaths and other social indicators, he found that higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness didn’t correlate with more gun deaths. But he did find one telling correlation: States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. (Read more at Florida’s “The Geography of Gun Deaths.”)

This is backed by other research: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.

9) Still, gun homicides (like all homicides) have declined over the past couple decades

The good news is that firearm homicides, like all homicides and crime, have declined over the past two decades.

There’s still a lot of debate among criminal justice experts about why this crime drop is occurring. Some of the most credible ideas include mass incarceration, more and better policing, and reduced lead exposure from gasoline. But one theory that researchers have widely debunked is the idea that more guns have deterred crime — in fact, the opposite may be true, based on research compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Center.

10) Most gun deaths are suicides

Although America’s political debate about guns tends to focus on grisly mass shootings and murders, a majority of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, this is actually one of the most compelling reasons for reducing access to guns: There is a lot of research that shows greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide.

11) The states with the most guns report the most suicides

12) Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily

Estelle Caswell/Vox

Perhaps the reason access to guns so strongly contributes to suicides is that guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and poison.

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously explained that this is why reducing access to guns can be so important to preventing suicides: Just stalling an attempt or making it less likely to result in death makes a huge difference.

“Time is really key to preventing suicide in a suicidal person,” Harkavy-Friedman said. “First, the crisis won’t last, so it will seem less dire and less hopeless with time. Second, it opens the opportunity for someone to help or for the suicidal person to reach out to someone to help. That’s why limiting access to lethal means is so powerful.”

She added, “f we keep the method of suicide away from a person when they consider it, in that moment they will not switch to another method. It doesn’t mean they never will. But in that moment, their thinking is very inflexible and rigid. So it’s not like they say, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. I’m going to try something else.’ They generally can’t adjust their thinking, and they don’t switch methods.”

13) Policies that limit access to guns have decreased suicides

Estelle Caswell/Vox

When countries reduced access to guns, they saw a drop in the number of firearm suicides. The data above, taken from a study by Australian researchers, shows that suicides dropped dramatically after the Australian government set up a mandatory gun buyback program that reduced the number of firearms in the country by about one-fifth.

The Australian study found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant (in large part because murders in Australia were already so low). But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.

Australia is far from alone in these types of results. A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent when the military stopped letting soldiers take their guns home over the weekend. The change was most pronounced during the weekends.

This data and research have a clear message: States and countries can significantly reduce the number of suicides by restricting access to guns.

14) In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty

Given that states with more guns tend to have more homicides, it isn’t too surprising that, as a study in the American Journal of Public Health found, states with more guns also have more cops die in the line of duty.

Researchers looked at federal data for firearm ownership and homicides of police officers across the US over 15 years. They found that states with more gun ownership had more cops killed in homicides: Every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period.

The findings could help explain why US police officers appear to kill more people than cops in other developed countries. For US police officers, the higher rates of guns and gun violence — even against them — in America mean that they not only will encounter more guns and violence, but they can expect to encounter more guns and deadly violence, making them more likely to anticipate and perceive a threat and use deadly force as a result.

15) Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early 2000s

Over the past two decades, Americans have shifted from mostly supporting the concept of gun control to greater support for protecting “the right of Americans to own guns,” according to Pew Research Center surveys. This shift has happened even as major mass shootings, such as the attacks on Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School, have received more press attention.

16) Specific gun control policies are fairly popular

Although most Americans say they want to protect the right to own firearms, most also back many gun control proposals — such as stronger background checks, a database to track gun sales, and banning assault-style weapons, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

This type of contradiction isn’t exclusive to gun policy issues. For example, although most Americans in the past said they don’t like Obamacare, most of them also said they like the specific policies in the health care law. Americans just don’t like some policy ideas until you get specific.

For people who believe the empirical evidence that more guns mean more violence, this contradiction is the source of a lot of frustration. Americans by and large support policies that reduce access to guns. But once these policies are proposed, they’re broadly spun by politicians and pundits into attempts to “take away your guns.” So nothing gets done, and preventable deaths keep occurring.

[autigeremt 6,569]

When will we begin to address the root cause of this issue? 

 

A lack of respect for life. 

[homersapien 11,353]

44 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

When will we begin to address the root cause of this issue? 

 

A lack of respect for life. 

Are you suggesting we are somehow different in our respect for life than the rest of the world? Do we have a higher incidence of mental illness than the rest of the world?

How do you explain the above statistics?

I agree that much of the problem is cultural, but it's the gun culture that's centrally intertwined with everything else.

 

[DKW 86 7,410]

On 9/3/2019 at 11:15 AM, homersapien said:

Are you suggesting we are somehow different in our respect for life than the rest of the world? Do we have a higher incidence of mental illness than the rest of the world?

How do you explain the above statistics?

I agree that much of the problem is cultural, but it's the gun culture that's centrally intertwined with everything else.

 

The first several graphs do a great job of semantics. They include "Suicides" and "Murders" in the word "Deaths." I have discussed this ad nauseum. 

Quote

 

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

How many people die from gun-related injuries in the U.S. each year?

In 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. This figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three other, less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were unintentional, involved law enforcement or whose circumstances could not be determined. It excludesdeaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in death certificates.)

What share of U.S. gun deaths are murders and what share are suicides?

Though they tend to get less attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2017,
60% gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (23,854), while
37% were murders (14,542),
according to the CDC. The remainder were unintentional (486), involved law enforcement (553) or had undetermined circumstances (338).

What share of all murders and suicides in the U.S. involve a gun?

Three-quarters of all U.S. murders in 2017 – 14,542 out of 19,510 – involved a firearm. About half (51%) of all suicides that year – 23,854 out of 47,173 – involved a gun.

How has the number of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?

The 39,773 total gun deaths in 2017 were the most since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online data. This was slightly more than the 39,595 gun deaths recorded in the prior peak year of 1993. Both gun murders and gun suicides have gone up in recent years: The number of gun murders rose 32% between 2014 and 2017, while the number of gun suicides rose each year between 2006 and 2017 (a 41% increase overall).

Gun suicides reached their highest recorded level in 2017. But the number of gun murders remained far below the peak in 1993, when there were 18,253 gun homicides – and when overall violent crime levels in the U.S. were much higher than they are today.

How has the rate of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?

While 2017 saw the highest total number of gun deaths in the U.S., this statistic does not take into account the nation’s growing population. On a per capita basis, there were 12 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2017 – the highest rate in more than two decades, but still well below the 16.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 1974, the highest rate in the CDC’s online database.

The gun murder and gun suicide rates in the U.S. are both lower today than in the mid-1970s. There were 4.6 gun murders per 100,000 people in 2017, far below the 7.2 per 100,000 people recorded in 1974. And the rate of gun suicides – 6.9 per 100,000 people in 2017 –  remained below the 7.7 per 100,000 measured in 1977. (One caveat when considering the 1970s figures: In the CDC’s database, gun murders and gun suicides between 1968 and 1978 are classified as those caused by “firearms and explosives.” In subsequent years, they are classified as deaths involving “firearms.”)

Which states have the highest and lowest gun death rates in the U.S.?

The rate of gun fatalities varies widely from state to state. In 2017, the states with the highest rates of gun-related deaths – counting murders, suicides and all other categories tracked by the CDC – were Alaska (24.5 per 100,000 people), Alabama (22.9), Montana (22.5), Louisiana (21.7), Missouri and Mississippi (both 21.5), and Arkansas (20.3). The states with the lowest rates were New Jersey (5.3 per 100,000 people), Connecticut (5.1), Rhode Island (3.9), New York and Massachusetts (both 3.7), and Hawaii (2.5).

How does the gun death rate in the U.S. compare with other countries?

The gun death rate in the U.S. is much higher than in most other nations, particularly developed nations. But it is still far below the rates in several Latin American nations, according to a study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The U.S. gun death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, the most recent year in the study, which uses a somewhat different methodology from the CDC. That was far higher than in countries such as Canada (2.1 per 100,000) and Australia (1.0), as well as European nations such as France (2.7), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6). But the rate in the U.S. was much lower than in El Salvador (39.2 per 100,000 people), Venezuela (38.7), Guatemala (32.3), Colombia (25.9) and Honduras (22.5), the study found. Overall, the U.S. ranked 20th in its gun fatality rate.

This is a difficult question to answer because there is no single, agreed-upon definition of the term “mass shooting.” Definitions can vary depending on factors including the number of victims and the circumstances of the shooting.

The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 85 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2018.

The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people – excluding the shooter – are shot or killed. Using this definition, 373 people died in these incidents in 2018.

Regardless of the definition being used, fatalities in mass shooting incidents in the U.S. account for a small fraction of all gun murders that occur nationwide each year.

How has the number of mass shootings in the U.S. changed over time?

The same definitional issue that makes it challenging to arrive at an exact number of mass shooting fatalities comes into play when trying to determine the frequency of U.S. mass shootings over time. The unpredictability of these incidents also complicates matters: As Rand Corp. noted in a 2018 research brief, “Chance variability in the annual number of mass shooting incidents makes it challenging to discern a clear trend, and trend estimates will be sensitive to outliers and to the time frame chosen for analysis.”

The FBI found an increase in active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013. The average number of incidents rose from 6.4 a year in the first seven years of the study to an average of 16.4 a year in the second seven-year period. In subsequent studies, the FBI recorded 20 active shooter incidents per year in 2014 and 2015, followed by 20 incidents in 2016, 30 in 2017 and 27 in 2018.

Which types of firearms are most commonly used in gun murders in the U.S.?

In 2017, handguns were involved in the majority (64%) of the 10,982 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available, according to the FBI. Rifles – the category that includes many guns that are sometimes referred to as “assault weapons”– were involved in 4%. Shotguns were involved in 2%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (30%) involved firearms that were classified as “other guns or type not stated.”

It’s important to note that the FBI’s statistics do not capture the details on all gun murders in the U.S. each year. The FBI’s data is based on information submitted by state and local police departments, and not all agencies participate or provide complete information each year. In 2017, nine-in-ten law enforcement agencies submitted data to the FBI.

 

Summation: People will lie and lie to you about gun violence.

1) Average gun deaths today:
60% are Suicides,
37% are Intentional Killings

2) As Bad as gun deaths are today (killings and suicides) as a percent of population, they are well below the 1974 High Mark. 

On 9/2/2019 at 12:19 PM, homersapien said:

Even under this broad definition, it’s worth noting that mass shootings make up less than 2 percent portion of America’s firearm deaths, which totaled nearly 40,000 in 2017 alone.

3) Quoted from homey's article above, Mass shootings ad up to <2% of the problem. LESS THAN 2% OF THE PROBLEM.

This is borderline statistically irrelevant if it werent for the human lives involved. 

4) The Gun Control Advocates do a great job of merging the statistics to suit them. They should be honestly reporting Killings Involving Guns, not Gun Deaths. Suicide is another completely different subject and does involve mental illness and makes up 60% of the numbers. 

5) Rifles – the category that includes many guns that are sometimes referred to as “assault weapons”– were involved in 4%.

6) All this doesnt mean at the end of the day that we shouldnt do common sense things to control gun purchases and ownership even for private sales. We need to eliminate any product that can turn a semi into a fully-automatic weapon. 

7) Why are some so anxious to regulate weapons used in 4% or less of the actions, and caused only 2% of the deaths at issue?

Does that makes sense to anyone? Why are we going to regulate 330M weapons to cover 4% or less of the Bad Actions, and caused <2% of the deaths. You also see that this blows away completely the lunacy that "THE GUNS HAVE CHANGED." Honestly, the guns that are causing 98% of the deaths havent changed at all. They are simply handguns. So why the emotional frenzy to ban or restrict guns that are in reality not much if any real part of the problem?

330M Guns....15,000 deaths nationwide.
The risk of one of those guns being involved in a death crime in one year is .000045%
The risk of one of those guns being involved in a death crime in fifty years is .0023%

What are we doing here? Lets regulate them, I and most of America are ready for that. But dont pretend that this is going to do bumpkis to slow the deathrate. We have to concentrate on criminals with guns if you are serious about stemming gun violence. 

***I would love to talk to the 2 nutjobs that gave me thumbs down, on second thought, why waste my time. They obviously are completely fact challenged and dont want real solutions, just more brainless TPM thinking***

 

[Tiger Sue 325]

I didn't see China in the stats but this won't help:

https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-children-killed-first-day-of-school-attack

[autigeremt 6,569]

On 9/3/2019 at 11:15 AM, homersapien said:

Are you suggesting we are somehow different in our respect for life than the rest of the world? Do we have a higher incidence of mental illness than the rest of the world?

How do you explain the above statistics?

I agree that much of the problem is cultural, but it's the gun culture that's centrally intertwined with everything else.

 

It’s not the gun culture. The gun isn’t the only tool being used to kill with. 

 

I don’t need a stat to see the obvious but the stats do back up my contention that people do not respect life like they used too. At least here in the U.S. 

[homersapien 11,353]

17 hours ago, autigeremt said:

It’s not the gun culture. The gun isn’t the only tool being used to kill with. 

 

I don’t need a stat to see the obvious but the stats do back up my contention that people do not respect life like they used too. At least here in the U.S. 

Your first sentence is a non sequitur.  Guns most certainly are the only tool that are used to create deaths caused by guns, which is the type of death these statistics examine.

It sounds to me like you do believe the US is somehow different than the rest of the world regarding respect for life.

But these statistics did not address cultural values- other than gun ownership- so they do nothing to "back up" your assumption regarding "respect for life".  They only addressed gun ownership and the numbers of guns in a given state or country versus deaths caused by guns. 

If you wanted to examine the differences between the states or the US and other countries regarding "respect for life", you would need to conduct a different study or studies than what these statistics addressed.

[DKW 86 7,410]

3 hours ago, homersapien said:

Your first sentence is a non sequitur.  Guns most certainly are the only tool that are used to create deaths caused by guns, which is the type of death these statistics examine.

It sounds to me like you do believe the US is somehow different than the rest of the world regarding respect for life.

But these statistics did not address cultural values- other than gun ownership- so they do nothing to "back up" your assumption regarding "respect for life".  They only addressed gun ownership and the numbers of guns in a given state or country versus deaths caused by guns. 

If you wanted to examine the differences between the states or the US and other countries regarding "respect for life", you would need to conduct a different study or studies than what these statistics addressed.

They did so only by fudging over facts and figures and glomming over accuracies,. 

[DKW 86 7,410]

On 9/6/2019 at 12:17 PM, homersapien said:

Your first sentence is a non sequitur.  Guns most certainly are the only tool that are used to create deaths caused by guns, which is the type of death these statistics examine. No, Suicides are not caused by guns. They are caused by mental illness or maybe terminal diease.

It sounds to me like you do believe the US is somehow different than the rest of the world regarding respect for life.
Yes, most do. We have historically had guns on school campuses and nothing happened at all. No school shootings. We have outlawed guns on campuses and shootings continue to get more and more prevalent. it is notymhing to do with guns, It is indeed a cultural problem.  

But these statistics did not address cultural values- other than gun ownership- so they do nothing to "back up" your assumption regarding "respect for life".  They only addressed gun ownership and the numbers of guns in a given state or country versus deaths caused by guns. And you are closing your eyes to facts and actualities. You are including suicides that mean absolutely nothing to the discourse. If they didnt have guns, they would kill themselves by slitting wrists, jumping off buildings, hanging, ratting out the Clintons, car wreck, suicide by Cop, overdosing, etc.

If you wanted to examine the differences between the states or the US and other countries regarding "respect for life", you would need to conduct a different study or studies than what these statistics addressed. That would be true, if we were comparing different nations and cultures. No one here is doing that at all. This is a red herring. We are comparing US Culture Back then to US Culture now. And the evidence is overwhelming. We can compare today to a few years ago. We have facts and history, etc. 

emt specifically stated that the culture he referred to was US Culture. You injected the red herring of nation versus nation. No one was discussing that. You were trying to confuse facts and obvious issues for others.

[homersapien 11,353]

24 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

emt specifically stated that the culture he referred to was US Culture. You injected the red herring of nation versus nation. No one was discussing that. You were trying to confuse facts and obvious issues for others.

Just ignore me.  I have no interest in engaging.

[autigeremt 6,569]

On 9/6/2019 at 12:17 PM, homersapien said:

Your first sentence is a non sequitur.  Guns most certainly are the only tool that are used to create deaths caused by guns, which is the type of death these statistics examine.

It sounds to me like you do believe the US is somehow different than the rest of the world regarding respect for life.

But these statistics did not address cultural values- other than gun ownership- so they do nothing to "back up" your assumption regarding "respect for life".  They only addressed gun ownership and the numbers of guns in a given state or country versus deaths caused by guns. 

If you wanted to examine the differences between the states or the US and other countries regarding "respect for life", you would need to conduct a different study or studies than what these statistics addressed.

You sir are just as bad as the far right loons. Good day to you.