Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Shhhh.
You're gonna blow the phony narrative with facts like that.
|
Gun homicides have been relatively flat for the last 15 years, even trending upward slightly in the last three years. The same is true for suicides, which make up the bulk of gun deaths. Homicides are down significantly from their highs in the early 90s.
Essentially we are at about 96 gun deaths a day in America, and this number has trended upwards by one or two in each of the last 3 years. Almost 2/3 of these are suicides.
We are at about 270 gun injuries a day in the US. This flips the cause--70% percent are assaults and only a small percentage are intentional self inflicted injuries.
Mass shootings, which represent a smaller percentage of gun incidents, have seen significant increases in the last few years. These are admittedly skewed by individual incident numbers.
So, it's not really a false narrative, and it becomes worse when you look at gun violence on a relative basis. You can do this a couple of different ways.
The first is versus other countries. The US continues to greatly outpace other developed nations in gun deaths. The gun homicide rate is about 25x the average for other high income nations. It is about 7-8x of the next closest high income nation.
We can also look at it versus other causes of death in the US. It is the leading cause of death for 15-19 year old males, making up about 30% of deaths in that cohort. It is the third leading cause of death for all children.
So, bottom line, we're better off than we were 30 years ago, but not any better off than we were 15 years ago.