A week ago I ran across something totally by accident that I want to share with you. Most Americans, nearly 6 out of 10 believe that homicides or mass shootings are the leading cause of gun deaths in the United States. They are wrong.
This was compiled in a July survey, conducted by APM Research Lab, two weeks before the two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.
The 1,009 respondents were asked this simple question — What is “responsible for the most gun deaths in the United States: suicides, mass shootings, murders other than mass shootings, or accidental discharges?”
Think about this question. What would your answer have been had you been contacted for this survey back in July, before reading this column?
Here are the results of the survey: Don’t Know, 4%; Mass Shootings 24%; Non-Mass Homicide 33%; Suicides 23%; Unintentional 14%.
This is way out of line with the actual breakdown of the approximate 39,000 gun deaths in 2017 (the most recent year for which data are available).
The correct breakdown of gun deaths from 2017 are as follows: Suicides 60.8%; Non-Mass Homicide 36.8%; Unintentional 1.2%; Undetermined 0.9%; Mass Shooting 0.3% (which at 117 was the highest yearly total between 1992 and 2018).
The qualifications for mass shootings for this survey were taken from a mass shooting database compiled by Mother Jones where a mass shooting is defined as when three or more victims are killed. They excluded shootings stemming from more conventionally motivated crimes such as armed robbery or gang violence.
Quoting the Washington Fee Beacon, where I first found this information, “Americans’ alarming lack of knowledge about the causes of gun deaths is just one instance of the misinformation that fuels the gun debate.”
When you breakdown the demographic groups in the survey only 30% of gun owners identified suicide as the leading cause of gun deaths. As a group 28% of Independents picked suicide while only 20% of Republicans and Democrats made the correct choice. The rest were ignorant.
Suicide by gun has been high for decades, and, tragically, rising since the turn of the century, while violent crime has been on a steady decline since its peak in 1992.
If you want more information that shows the ignorance that most of us have regarding gun deaths here it is — school shootings are down. In fact, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern, four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today.
Here is another important fact. The overwhelming majority of gun deaths, including suicides, are committed using handguns, but every 2020 Democratic candidate for president wants to ban “assault-style” rifles.
So why aren’t Democrats in general talking about confiscating and eliminating hand guns? Would it help stop needless suicides? Maybe not. Japan, a country with some of the worlds strictest gun laws also has a high rate of suicides.
Rifles, it turns out, are used in just 2.8 percent of murders, a figure that fell by 24 percent in 2018. Rifles were used in fewer murders than knives, fists, and blunt objects, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
Figures researched by the National Shooting Sports Foundation show that just over 16 million semi-automatic rifles, such as AR-15s and AKs, have been produced or imported into the country since 1990.
The fact is the overwhelming majority of American who own a semi-automatic rifle are law abiding hard working citizens.
Any death, however unnecessary, is a tragedy whether by gun, knife or car accident. What’s important is to have the actual facts when debating gun violence in America.
Our ignorance on gun deaths is just another reason why all of us should get the facts before we jump to conclusions.
NOTE: There is an organization working to curb suicide by gun violence, it’s called the Safer Homes Collaborative. They raise awareness that suicide can be prevented through safe gun storage.
