President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
How much of that is suicide?
Is there an acceptable figure?
Try the other way around: how much gun control would impact in the total suicide number?
Look at what happened when England reduced CO access by switching from coal gas to natural gas.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves-lives/
Suicide is often a matter of convenience. If it’s harder to kill yourself, many people are less likely to do it. I suspect reducing access to guns would reduce suicides just like it did with coal gas.
This article is about assault weapon bans, which are not exactly the go-to for suicide.
This is the sad reality. Gun violence is generally committed by sick people. Similarly, I saw this chart a few years back on Australian gun/knife violence. The plots are mirrored. Violence is sort of static.
That plot is in percentage. Of course violence is static. Because 100% of homicides are violent. Let’s see total number of homicides per year.
Edit: To clarify, if gun and non-knife homicides dropped to zero, and knife homicides dropped to one, that plot would show knife homicides skyrocket to 100%. The plot isn’t demonstrating the trend you think it is.
It’s much more likely to survive a stabbing than to survive a shooting.
“A new Johns Hopkins Medicine analysis of national trauma data shows that trauma patients were four times more likely to die from gunshot wounds and nearly nine times more likely to die from stab wounds before getting to a trauma center in 2014, compared with rates in 2007.”
That doesn’t mean what you think it means. You are not twice as likely to die form a stab wound, if you are treated quickly fort a stab wound you are much more likely to survive compared to a gunshot wound. You need to look at the incidence of death percentages:
“(Gunshot wound: early, 2.0% vs. late, 4.9%; Stab wound: early, 0.2% vs. late, 1.1%)”
So a stab wound if treated early has a 0.2% chance of death compared to a gunshot wound which has a 2% chance of death, meaning gunshots are 10 times as deadly. Under late treatment its 1% chance of death for stab wounds, and 4% for gunshots, so gunshots are 4 times as deadly.
Even late treated stab wounds are half as deadly as early treated gunshots. Gunshots are far more deadly than stabbings.
I don’t recall the origin of that or whether that’s the exact wording but the general idea at least has stuck with me.
If you run away from a guy with a knife, you have to outrun the knife-wielder. If you run away from a guy with a gun, you have to outrun the bullet.
About half, it was 54% in 2021. The problem with an assault weapons ban is it will do almost nothing to gun violence. More people are murdered with hammers every year then with ar15s. The vast majority of US gun violence is performed with regular pistols.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
If they actually cared about the problem instead of just publicity, then they would look at banning pistols of all magazine capacities instead of rifles. If they wanted to do something acceptable for both sides of the aisle that could eliminate up to 40% of gun violence, they would prohibit people with domestic abuse charges from owning firearms. (See The Problem with Jon Stewart).
Or they could address the core problems facing people at the bottom of the economic scale, like hunger and mental health amd healthcare, the problems that make them desperate and emotional. Banning guns to prevent murder is akin to banning alcohol to prevent drunk driving. It works, but it hinders the majority of law abiding citizens all because a small percent of people misuse it.
The sad truth is they dgaf. So they do publicity shit like this that doesn’t matter.