Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study
Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show.
Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.
In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.
The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.
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It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.
“It’s hard to know what’s going on there,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center. Women, people of color and the elderly were more likely to believe that gun crime was up than men, younger adults or white people. The center plans to examine crime issues more closely later this year.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-gun-crimes-pew-report-20130507,0,3022693.story
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Plunged is not an overstatement, if this graph is accurate:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZWCqYSE__5s/UPdTkH57L0I/AAAAAAAAAM8/e4o5XjRv6Zo/s1600/US-NY+Crime+Comparison.JPG
Also, it's expressed as a per/100,000 value and has "0" at the graph origin, so it's not a deceptive chart.
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Just because "gun crime" and homicides are temporarily trending downward, you declare the gun problem solved?
The common focus on gun deaths as a marker to illustrate America’s “gun problem” obscures an alarming trend. The number of persons who suffer nonfatal gunshot injuries―that is, who are shot but do not die―has risen over the same period. As graphically demonstrated by the chart above, this means simply that more people are being shot by guns every year. In other words, America’s gun problem is getting worse, not better.
More are being shot, and fewer of them are dying. We're getting pretty good at keeping GSW victims alive, what with our recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our relentless pursuit of emergency medical technology.
