What’s the deal with gun violence in America?
Most people are under the impression that gun violence is on the rise, which is to be expected when public shootings receive the kind of coverage they do. But there’s no correlation between how much actual gun violence there is in America, and how the media reports on it. In fact, media reporting on gun violence has been on the rise while actual gun violence has been declining.
In the Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey, more than half (56%) of Americans said the number of gun crimes had gone up compared with 20 years ago. Another 26% said the number of gun crimes had remained the same, and just 12% said gun crimes had declined.
According to their survey, while most were of the impression that gun violence has increased, in reality:
- The 2011 homicide rate was almost half of the rate in 1991, and according to the Pew Research Center, the 2013 gun-related death rate was half of the rate in 1993.
- The number of nonfatal firearm crimes committed in 2011 was one-sixth the number committed in 1993.
So gun violence was cut in half over a two-decade period and continues to dwindle downward, and NOW we need gun control?
Here are the rest of the facts, courtesy of the Daily Signal;
1. The principal public safety concerns are suicides and illegally owned handguns.
According to Pew, two-thirds of America’s annual gun deaths are suicides. In 2010 alone, 19,392 Americans used guns to kill themselves.
Most gun-related crimes are carried out with illegally owned firearms—as much as 80 percent according to some estimates.
2. Most gun homicides are committed with handguns, not rifles.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports prove that the overwhelming majority of gun-related homicides are perpetrated with handguns, with rifles of any kind accounting for less than 3 percent of gun-related homicides.
3. A small number of factors significantly increase the likelihood that a person will be a victim of a gun-related homicide.
Where do you live? Murders in the United States are very concentrated. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, over 50 percent of murders occur in 2 percent of the nation’s 3,142 counties. 54 percent of U.S. counties had zero murders in 2014.
Are you in a gang? According to the Department of Justice’s National Gang Center, particularly in urban areas, significant percentages of gun-related homicides (15 percent to 33 percent) are linked with gang and drug activity.
Are you a male between 15 and 34? The majority of standard gun murder victims are men between the ages of 15 and 34. Although black men make up roughly 7 percent of the population, they account for almost two-thirds of gun murder victims every year.
4. Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
Switzerland and Israel have much higher gun ownership rates than the United States but experience far fewer homicides and have much lower violent crime rates than many European nations with strict gun control laws
Higher rates of concealed carry permit holders are even more strongly associated with reduction in violent crime than are right-to-carry states.
5. There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence ironically makes this clear with its ratings for states based on gun laws. “Gun freedom” states that score poorly, like New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, and Oregon, have some of the lowest homicide rates. Conversely, “gun control-loving” states that received high scores, like Maryland and Illinois, experience some of the nation’s highest homicide rates..
In 2013, President Barack Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess existing research on gun violence. The report, found (among other things) that firearms are used defensively hundreds of thousands of times every year.
For as much as liberals love to blame the “NRA” or “gun lobby” for a lack of gun control legislation in America, they have no one to blame but themselves. There’s one side of the gun control debate that knows absolutely nothing about guns, and I don’t need to tell you which one that is. How do liberals expect to get gun control legislation passed, when they barely seem to know what a “semi-automatic” weapon is?
Share this story with all your liberal friends so they know the truth about guns in America!
