"Mention the Second Amendment, and all too often, people reach for their revolvers." So begins Craig R. Whitney's Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment (2013). Whitney's right. Gun control, the Second Amendment, assault rifles . . . this country is beginning to wrestle publicly with its longstanding obsession with guns and gun control.
And as with any wrestling match, the contestants are lining up with their "facts" about who's winning and who's losing. Here, you'll find an assortment of facts I've encountered in my reading about America's checkered history with guns, guns control, and public safety. I won't interpret these facts. But I'll cite my sources, and leave the interpretation to you.
- Household gun ownership has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s to 43 percent in the 1990s and to 35 percent in the 2000s (source).
- In AK, WA, OR, NV, and UT, gun suicides alone exceed traffic deaths (source).
- In CA, AZ, CO, LA, MO, IL, MI, OH, and VA, total gun deaths exceed traffic deaths (source).
- There are about 103,000 machine guns currently in private hands (source).
- In 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the National Firearms Act (NFA). This was the first significant federal law that regulated firearms. The law covered machine guns and short-barreled weapons. It did not outlaw them, but imposed substantial restrictions—including fingerprints—on their transfers.
- Americans purchase about 4 million guns a year. Approximately 40% of American homes have guns (Winkler, Adam. Gun Fight: The Right to Bear Arms in America, 29).
- Sixty-five percent of American guns are owned by 20% of American households (source).
- Forty-three of the 50 state constitutions contain language that clearly protects the rights of individuals to own guns (Winkler, 33).
- Guns are exempted by NRA-inspired federal law from the Consumer Protection Act, which insists on safety standards for 15,000 products, ranging from toy guns to airplanes. Only the gun manufacturers themselves can issue recalls. Gun manufacturers are also immune from negligence and product liability lawsuits (source).
- John Adams in his 1787 book, A Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America, argued that guns could be used effectively for "private self-defense (Winkler,104).
- A gun in the home makes suicide in that home almost 5 times more likely (4.5) (source).
- Suicide attempts with guns are 92% effective; carbon monoxide, 78%; hanging, 77%; drowning, 66%; poison, 23%; drugs, 11%; cutting with a knife or shart object, 4%. (Henigan, Dennis, Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy, 24)
- The US accounts for 5% of the world's population and 50% of its guns (source).
- In America, 87 people die each day die from gun violence, or one person every 16 minutes: 54 from suicide, 31 from intentional homicide, and 2 from accidents (source).
- For the first time in decades, more people in 2015 are projected to die from guns than from motor vehicles (source).
- At the current rate of gun deaths, 339,000 Americans will perish over the next decade. That is approximately the size of Tampa, FL (source).
- Americans murder each other with guns at a rate nearly 20 times higher than people in other high-income countries.1 Among a group of 32 comparable nations, the United States accounts for 30 percent of the population, but 90 percent of the gun homicides (source Note: this is a redacted document, but the Executive Summary, whence this figure is derived, is still readable).
- Of the 32 countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development), America has 30% of the population, but 90% of the firearm homicides (source).
- While the number of gun murders in the US has remained relatively stable over the last decade, the number of shootings has increased. We haven't reduced gun violence in our country, but we have gotten better at treating it in our trauma centers (source).
- Since May, 2007, there have been at least 28 mass-shootings by concealed-carry license holders (source).