An Update on Gun Violence in the USA, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) announces a large increase in Deaths Caused by Guns in 2017.

Back in February I published a two-part post looking at gun violence in the United States and how it compares to that in other countries. (See my posts of 21 and 24 February 2018) Now this last week the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has released their statistics for US gun violence in the year 2017 so I’d like to take a chance to look at the new figures.

Not surprisingly the number of Americans killed grew once again to a total of 39,773, up more than a thousand from 38,658 in 2016. Adjusting for age, in 2017 12 Americans out of every 100,000 died by firearm in 2017 the highest rate since 1979, 40 years ago. In fact if you look at the pie chart shown in the image below you’ll see that the United States had the second highest total of gun related deaths of any nation on Earth, behind only Brazil.

Gun Deaths around the World (Credit: CNN)

Now in a sense comparing total gun deaths isn’t fair since Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela and Guatemala all have smaller populations making their rate of deaths caused by guns much higher. Still, it’s an eerie thought that only six countries account for half of the gun deaths in the entire world, and they’re all in the Western Hemisphere!

Now while I was doing my analysis of gun violence back in February I freely admitted that I was shocked to discover that suicides outnumbered homicides by a wide margin. The data from 2017 continues that trend with 23,854 people killing themselves with a gun as opposed to 15,919 people being killed by someone else. 60% of the total gun deaths are in fact suicides.

If we take a closer look at the demographic breakdown of the suicides in the US, see image below, we quickly discover another shocking fact. The number of suicides among white men, 18,759 is more than three times the number, 5095, for all other demographic groups combined, 79% of the total. Now it is true that white men are a large demographic group here in the US making up 30% of the entire population but that still means that they are killing themselves at almost nine times the rate of the rest of the American population.

Suicides across Demographic Groups (Credit: CNN)

Now taking a look at the breakdown of the homicides, see image below, we find another shocker. Here it is black men who are by far the largest number of victims. Last year 7,661 black men were gunned down compared to 8,258 for all other groups combined, 48% of the total number. In 2017 a black male was approximately six times more likely to be murdered than someone from another demographic group.

Homicides across Demographic Groups (Credit: CNN)

Statistics like these cry out for explanation, demand that somebody do something. The obvious fact that our horribly high rates of suicide and murder are so concentrated in only two demographic groups means that there are social problems unique to those groups. Problems that, if they are found and studied can be reduced if not eliminated entirely. The suicide rate in particular is obviously a mental health issue that begs for a non-political solution.

At the present time however federal agencies like the CDC are legally being prevented from studying gun violence by lawmakers. These so-called leaders are supported by the gun industry and therefore refuse to even consider any sensible approach to reducing gun violence.

First and foremost we need to allow our nation’s best scientific minds to study the problem of gun violence in this country. Only then will we have any chance of giving the people of the United States freedom from gun violence.

Guns and Gun Violence: Just the Facts, Part Two.

This is the second part of a two-part post concerning guns and gun violence here in the United States. In the first part I compared gun violence in the US to that in nineteen other nations starting with a comparison of gun ownership to the rate of gun violence.

I also considered the question of whether simply removing guns would only result in murders being committed by other means. In other words, ‘guns aren’t the problem, people are the problem’. Finally I looked at how gun suicide is actually a much greater problem than gun homicide.

In today’s post I intent to continue to look at the issue of gun violence from state to state within the US. As in the first part I will try to only present the facts and allow you to make up your own mind. Consider the evidence below and hopefully we can find some solutions to this horrific problem.

One thing I discovered in researching data for this post is that very often it is impossible to find the exact same type of data for different countries or different areas within a country. For example in my last post I described the number of guns in a country as the number of guns owned per person, which was the statistic I used.

However for different states within the United States that statistic is not available. What statistical measure is available is the percentage of households in each state with a gun, which is the statistic I will employ today. The fact that different governments and agencies within governments often keep different statistical measurements is one of the reasons why making sense of issues like gun violence is so very difficult.

In the table below I list twenty states and the percentage of households in those states that possess guns. The states were chosen at random except I intentionally included my home state of Pennsylvania.

Table 1

Column 1 of the table gives the percent of households with guns while column 2 gives the number of gun related deaths per 300,000 people in those states. The relationship between those statistics can be seen more clearly when they are plotted together as in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The figure makes clear the dependence of gun violence on gun availability. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Arkansas was so much more dangerous a place that New York or New Jersey. Those states with stricter controls on guns simply have less gun violence, that is just a fact.

However, as in my last post we must consider the argument that if people can’t get guns they will still commit murders with other weapons. To analyze that argument I will plot the total number of homicides in each state (in table 1 the far column on the right) versus the number of homicides committed by guns (third column from the left) in Figure 2.

Figure 2

This figure shows clearly that the total number of homicides in a state tracks pretty well with the number of gun homicides. The percentage of total to gun homicides (shown in the second column from the right) varies between about 75% and 55%, except for Hawaii which has hardly any gun homicides.

So for the argument that if people can’t get guns they’ll still commit violence with other weapons consider this. Arkansas has almost no gun restrictions and people there choose a gun to commit murder 71% of the time. Meanwhile New Jersey has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the US and there people use a gun to commit murder 71% of the time. The people in New Jersey are not using other weapons to kill each other they are actually killing each other less often!

In my last post I also discovered that a greater availability of guns in a country greatly increased the number of gun related suicides in that country. I will now show that this is also true for the states within the US. Figure 3 shows a breakdown of the total number of gun deaths into homicides and suicides along with accidental gun deaths.

Again it can be seen that the number of gun suicides is higher than gun homicides in all but two out of twenty states. In fact, what is going on in Montana which has relatively few gun homicides but by far the greatest number of gun suicides! The Suicide rate there is more than ten times the homicide rate!

I don’t know about you but I think I learned quite a bit in researching the statistical evidence for these last two posts. I particular I admit I was shocked by the amount of gun related suicides.

However all of the evidence I’ve shown here only confirmed something I had already known before I started. More Guns Just Means More Violence! This is true whether you are considering gun violence across different nations (as in Figures 1 and 2 in my last post) or across different states (as in Figure 1 of this post).

Also, while it is true that people will commit violence even without guns the reason we so often choose guns to commit our violence is because they make it so easy to commit violence. Guns make us more efficient killers and therefore just increase the bloodshed.

It’s just a fact that the countries with fewer guns, Denmark, England or Japan for example, have less violence, not just less gun violence. The same is true of states; Hawaii and Massachusetts are just safer places to live because they have fewer guns!

I’ll end my analysis here. The evidence speaks for itself.

Guns and Gun Violence: Just the Facts, Part One.

Gun violence, and the use of gun control in an effort to reduce that violence, is arguably the most contentious issue plaguing the United States today. The arguments both for and against, along with their proponents have become so entrenched, and so heated that the actual facts get lost in a flood of rhetoric and vindictiveness. All too often the talking heads in the media skip over the available objective evidence in their hurry to tell you what ‘Is the only possible solution’.

Now before I begin, I’m going to try to just give the facts, no proposals about what we have to do. I only ask you to consider the evidence cited below and make up you’re own mind. I’ve always hated it when anyone told me what to think or do so I will try my best to avoid doing that.

This will be a two-part post. Today I will be comparing the situation here in the United States to that in other nations while in my next post I will examine the nature of gun violence between different states within the US.

Also, the evidence given below is statistical in nature. We are dealing with the populations of countries and states numbering in the millions. We will be considering crimes numbering in the tens of thousands. Only statistical methods can adequately describe the behavior of such large groups, which are technically know as ensembles. Anecdotal evidence of the sort ‘there was this guy in outer Slobovia who stabbed a bunch of people so see, guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ is immaterial and indeed, can be little short of a falsehood. (Obviously the example I just made up is a falsehood)

First of all let’s just consider these two questions, how many guns are there in the US and how does that number that compare with that in other nations. In table 1 below the first column gives the number of privately owned guns for every 100 persons for both the US and 19 other nations.

Table 1

 

(At this point I must admit that, aside from trying to get at least two countries from every continent, I just picked the first 19 countries I thought of with 2 big exceptions. Russia and China have not been included because I was unable to obtain the information I needed about them. I suppose their governments don’t want us to make any comparisons about them. The data above is the latest I could find dating from 2014 for the US and 2011 and after for the other countries)

(Also the data which is given in the table above and used in the figures below comes from GunPolicy.org at the University of Sidney Australia which you can visit at the link below)

https://www.gunpolicy.org

In the table it is clear that the US possesses fully three times as many guns per person as any other nation. Comparing this value with the number of gun deaths per 10,000 people every year, which is listed in column two, we can see the relationship between the number of guns in a country and the rate of deaths caused by guns. This relationship can be more clearly seen if the two columns are plotting together as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

Two things are immediately clear from the figure. The first is that three nations, The US, Mexico and especially Brazil have far higher rates of gun deaths than any of the other 17 countries. The second is that, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil, gun ownership per person tracks very well with gun deaths per 10,000 each year.

Statistically Mexico and Brazil are called outliers, that is there is some factor causing a high rate of gun deaths in those nations that is not a factor in the other 18 countries. Indeed anyone who follows world events knows that Mexico and Brazil are both are fighting bloody civil conflicts against well-organized criminal gangs, a condition that is not present in our other countries.

Since we are trying to determine the effect of guns on gun deaths, not the effect of organized crime, we are justified in removing the outliers from our data set provided we make it clear that we are doing and detail our rational for doing so, as I have done above. With Mexico and Brazil removed Figure 1 now becomes Figure 2.

Figure 2

 

 

The relationship between gun ownership and gun death can now be clearly seen, you can almost write it as an equation. For every gun owned per person in a country, one person out of 10,000 will be killed by a gun every year.

At this point it can be argued that guns are not the only way to kill someone, indeed people were killing each other on a regular basis long before guns were invented. If you reduce the number of guns the argument goes, won’t people just go back to killing each other with swords or knives or even rocks if they have to?

In order evaluate this argument I will now plot the total homicides, murders by all kinds of weapons, versus gun homicides only. For the argument to be valid, nations with low gun ownership should have a large difference between the two numbers due to homicides by other means. This comparison is shown in Figure 2.

With respect to the data in Table 1 I am now comparing the third column from the left with the last column all the way on the right.

Figure 3

 

This figure does in fact appear to bare out the argument that taking away guns won’t stop violence. Consider India for example. India has the second highest total homicide rate but very, very few gun homicides. Checking table 1 for gun ownership in India we also see that the country possesses very few privately owned guns so India’s problem with violence cannot be linked to guns. To a lesser degree the same can be said for Norway and Vietnam which also have a fairly large number of homicides but few of them are gun related.

Nevertheless that is only three out of twenty nations and even India’s second highest total homicide rate is still significantly lower that that of the United States. While it is true that if people really want to kill each other they will find a way to do it, it is also clearly true that readily available guns just make it so much easier to commit murder! It is true that people kill people, but guns multiply the body count by a large factor!

As a last issue for analysis today I’d like to take a closer look inside the figures for the number of gun related deaths for each nation. You see those deaths are not all homicides, gun suicide and accidental gun deaths are also a significant factor. Very significant as you can see in Figure 4.

Figure 4

 

I have to admit that this result shocked me. The number of gun suicides in the United States is nearly double the number of gun homicides. In plain English we are killing ourselves twice as often with our guns as we are killing someone else. The chart shows that this ratio is approximately true in general around the world.

Surely we can all agree to do something about this aspect of gun violence. Surely we can find ways to prevent people who admit that they are suffering from depression or other mental problems from obtaining the guns with which they kill themselves. Even just allowing doctors and psychologists to try to convince those of their patients who are depressed to voluntarily give up their right to bare arms could make a significant difference.

But I guess I’m now crossing over into telling you what I think should be done and I promised not to do that. Rather than go any further I’ll stop here for today. In my next post I will look at how gun violence differs from state to state within US.