Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

As the midterms are getting closer, both parties are ramping up their rhetoric to enrage (sorry, I meant engage) the crowd. Some time ago I was looking for plain stats on gun related deaths and found a nice table on fbi.gov about crime in 2017. The table presented a simple picture: out of 40k deaths only 5k were of criminal nature (i.e. not a suicide, not self defense) and nearly all of those 5k cases were inter-gang disputes. This left us a couple hundreds of "random crimes", but for a nation of 350 million people, armed to the brows, that's an astonishingly good self restraint. FBI stopped publishing that table after 2017, probably because it revealed an obvious emm.. bias in the numbers.

Edit. In the meantime, deer remains the most dangerous animal in the US. It is deer who causes a couple millions of car crashes every year. Yet, nobody is afraid of deers.

Those tables still exist, here's the one for 2019;

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

It's not super useful since roughly half of the homicides aren't categorized though -- and something like 120,000 people are shot every year, it just happens that many of them survive. Let's not be too excited about our 'self-restraint'. Especially when some 4channer just live-streamed another mass shooting.

Deer may cause a lot of accidents (more like 1 million than 'a couple'), but they're the size of a large dog.. very few people die in car-deer accidents -- on the order of 200 per year.

If that's your metric for accidental deaths not worth worrying about, while both the population and its gun ownership have increased by at least one half since 1980, accidental gun deaths keep going down, from around 800 in 1980 to 486 for 2019, the last year the CDC has reported data on all causes of death.

> Yet, nobody is afraid of deers.

You haven't seen my wife drive along the park near sundown. (Or if you have, you may have leaned on your horn.)

Last year, a co-worker was widowed, another co-worker was badly wounded, in both cases by random bullets probably from an inter-gang dispute having nothing to do with them. But inter-gang dispute though it likely was, one man is dead, the other recovering slowly.

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