Now that the death rate from Covid-19 is beginning to finally bottom out, with an average count over the past week of less than 350 deaths per day, everyone is starting to get worried again about the number of people dying because they have been shot by guns. So far this year, it appears that gunfire has killed more than 8,100 people, or 54 fatal shootings every day. Meanwhile, during the previous six years, the daily gun-homicide average was 14 deaths per day.
These numbers come from our friends at the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which has been tracking shootings since 2014. The GVA scrapes information about gun violence from a variety of open-source venues, including media and other websites, online police reports, government, and other digital repositories, all together totaling 7,500 sources which may or may not contain daily data about injuries caused by guns.
The good news is that the GVA website gives you current numbers, whereas the information aggregated by the FBI and the CDC is, at best, several years behind. The GVA listings also allow for studying the details about individual gun events and can be searched by individual shooting events in specific states.
The not so good news is that because most of the data appears to be lifted from online media reports, the degree to which such reports really capture gun violence trends is often determined by the old news adage about how the editors decide what stories get the daily space, i.e., if it bleeds, it leads.
Unfortunately, a murder always seems to bleed more than an aggravated assault. Which is why the GVA gun violence numbers are probably near reality when it comes to counting homicides, but don’t come close to telling us what we need to know about non-fatal gun assaults. Because the truth is that the only difference, the only difference between fatal and non-fatal gun assaults is that in the latter case, the guy with the gun didn’t shoot straight.
The CDC used to publish an annual number for non-fatal gun injuries but has deleted the numbers for every year since 2012. Prior to that year, their yearly estimate was somewhere around 60,000, give or take another 15,000 shooting events. In other words, the CDC was admitting that it’s methodology for estimating non-fatal gun assaults was so weak that maybe the actual number was 50% higher (or lower) than what their numbers actually show.
So, when the media carries a story today about the surge in gun violence which seems to be happening throughout the United States, the data being used to track this surge only counts what is probably less than one-third of all such events, and could be even less than one-tenth, or even less than that.
The World Health Organization (that’s the organization we used to belong to) defines violence as an intentional attempt to injure yourself or someone else. The injury can be fatal or non-fatal, it can be physical or psychological. Either way, intentional attempts to injure someone else which result in that person’s death, are a small part of a much larger whole.
We can get a partial image of this larger whole by looking at the numbers published by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which is an annual report out of the Department of Justice based on interviews with 160,000 respondents in roughly 95,000 households throughout the U.S. Like every other government report, there are the usual complaints about accuracy, reliability, blah, blah, blah, and blah.
Be that as it may, the 2019 report, which you can download here, shows that there were more than a million assaults that year. Although the type of weapon isn’t specified, we can assume that many of those assaults involved guns.
The bottom line is that we really have absolutely no idea about whether gun violence is going up or going down. So how do you figure out a new law to prevent or reduce gun violence when you can’t tell whether the law, once enacted, will work at all?
You can’t.
Jul 01, 2021 @ 10:46:06
And suicides (by gun or whatever) are always under counted. “John Jones died suddenly at home>”
Jul 01, 2021 @ 11:06:39
When has the bottom line had to do with preventing or reducing violence with guns? It hasn’t…what we need is another law. Let’s blame lawful gun owners for the behavior of criminals, lets support nuisance laws that restrict the behavior of people who just want to protect themselves and their families. Let’s not identify a problem and then figure out how best to solve it, but to punish and marginalize people who want to take control of their own protection.
The answer is a simple one for those who like to project their feelings onto another…P A S S A N O T H E R G U N L A W!!!
Jul 01, 2021 @ 13:37:32
It’s strange, but My guns and I have committed exactly the same amount of “Gun Violence” During the Pandemic as Before it: Absolutely None…Same with every other Gun owner I know.
If the “GVP Community’s” actual goal was to prevent “Gun” Violence and Crime, they would focus their efforts on those Commiting (all types of) Violence and Crime. If they were really concerned about “Gun” Suicides, they would try to prevent people commiting (all types of) Suicide….
Instead Gun Banners want to create more laws for the already Law abiding. Why? Because the goal of “Gun Violence Prevention” is really: Gun OWNERSHIP Prevention.