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
Is there any evidence to support this, or is it just what you think?
Proof? no, if there were proof our data would simply have to be better than it is. Are there a lot of statistical and geographical tendencies working against this data that are easily pointed out, yes.
The biggest ones: suicides usually occur in places where the body will be discovered and people who commit suicide tend to want to be found.
Homocides tend to be covered up more often or occur in more remote locations; lots of unsolved homocides end up as missing persons, especially in less dense areas. A few are staged as suicides or accidents.
So there’s absolutely a tendency for the data to skew in certain directions. This isn’t even addressing more chaotic problems liks a lack a lack of qualified coroners, incentives to not charge police who just riddle people with bullets, etc.
To be clear I can’t stand the carnage and think it’s one of the country’s biggest faults. That being said, I’m not sure how what you’ve presented shows suicides as over reported. Suicide in a place likely to be found results in more accurate counting of suicide not extra deaths counted as suicide. Homicides being counted as missing persons doesn’t over count suicide, it under counts homicide. Police shootings actually likely under count suicide since no police shooting is going to be labeled “suicide by cop”. The qualified coroner thing is actually pretty crazy and a lot of places require little or no actual pathology knowledge, so who knows.
All this to say when we boil these tragedies down to numbers, when the discussion is assault weapons bans, suicides probably don’t belong in the discussion. Disproportionally few suicides are committed with guns targeted by assault weapons bans. That doesn’t remove suicide from the gun deaths discussion at all. If I might offer an unsubstantiated opinion of my own, I believe suicidal people are probably more likely to benefit from mental health intervention than the serial killers who are mass shooters. (Which is the only acceptable solution to the right, not that they’re willing to pay for it.) Those a-hole attention whores ARE increasingly using guns that would likely be targeted in an AWB, and they’re doing it because it helps grab the headline and gets the president to talk about how terrible what you did was. In the meanwhile this is going to remain political fodder for politicians and cannon fodder for the rest of us.