America is a violent place by any standard. The national firearm-related death rate has held steady at 10.5 per 100,000 people since 1999, well above the global average. Some of its cities exhibit epidemic rates of gun death on par with crime-affected urban centers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Hard as it might be to believe, levels of lethal violence are actually at historic lows.
Misleading. Firearms related deaths include suicides, which are 2/3 of all gun deaths, and justifiable homicides, which are not crimes. Ironic thing is, those urban centers like NOLA, DC, Chicago, Oakland, and Detroit have low to non existent legal gun ownership rates. The areas with high legal gun ownership rates are as safe as Western Europe and Australia. BTW, those Latin American and Caribbean countries have much stricter gun laws than even DC.
Declines occurred after the passage of specific legislation designed to prevent gun-related deaths. Gun homicides dropped after the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993), the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act or so-called Assault Weapons Ban (1994), and the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (1998). In the absence of significant federal legislation over the past, further reductions in gun violence have stalled.
post hoc ergo propter hoc. The 1960s spike started after many states passed stricter gun laws and continued to go even higher after the 1968 Gun Control Act. Removing lead from gasoline and an aging population, fewer males 17-25, are the reasons for the drop.
It is worth putting the United States’ exceptional gun violence problem into perspective. The country´s firearm homicide rate is over six times higher than neighboring Canada’s, and 45 times as high as England’s. With the highest rates of gun homicide, suicide and accidental death in the industrialized world, it is not surprising that Americans also feel afraid.
1/3 of Canadian murders are firearms related. Less than 20 percent of Mexico's murders are firearms related.
The percentage of Americans who fear walking alone at night has increased since 2001 to nearly 4 in 10 in 2011. And yet national authorities have consistently refused introducing measures to curb gun violence. Strangely, Congress has opted instead to undermine gun control legislation, curb gun safety awareness, and abandon violence prevention programs, including some that registered positive results.
I don't think the number increased, it is just that concealed carry has been liberalized.
Meanwhile, in many states, laws intended to promote the responsible use of guns are being repealed. Instead, legislation that reproduces irresponsible firearms use – including so-called “stand your ground” laws – are being pursued. So what explains America’s reversal on gun control?
What law promotes the use of responsible use? SYG has nothing to do with gun control, it is a use of force law. SYG has been around for 130 years, and is the law in 33 states and the federal level by either statute or common law. Many of the states that passed SYG laws were simply codifying what was already common law. Georgia and Florida are prime examples of this. SYG simply means you don't have a legal duty to retreat.
Concerted efforts to roll back progressive gun regulation began by stealth. They started with quiet lobbying campaigns to reduce American citizens` capacity to diagnose firearm-related violence and thus fully apprehend the magnitude of the problem. In 1996 under considerable pressure from the pro-gun lobby, Congress de-funded firearms-related public health research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by 96 percent. To put this in perspective, resources devoted to firearms research constituted just 0.0018 percent of the CDC´s 2013 budget. Given that firearm deaths constitute around 1.3 percent of total national mortality, it could be reasonably argued that the CDC’s gun-related research program should have been roughly 722 times larger.
The CDC wasn't doing research, it was lobbying. None of the studies could be replicated by independent researchers, and many times the "researchers", usually MDs not criminologists, would not release their data for peer review.
Meanwhile, the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been prohibited since 1978 from compiling meaningful data on firearms sales. Moreover, its field offices in states bordering Mexico where illegal arms trafficking is rife are underfunded and understaffed.
The ATF is largely incompetent, but has always been underfunded.
More recently, a 2013 Congressional rider stripped the ATF of the authority to compile data on the very gun stores it licenses – data that the authors have made use of to estimate US-Mexico arms trafficking. Making matters worse, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is prohibited since 2003 from gathering data for the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that it is mandated by law to administer on behalf of gun stores.
Without such detailed data, it is easy to misdiagnose the causes and consequences of gun violence, and therefore mis-prescribe the interventions needed to prevent it. Indeed, many lawmakers have expressed reluctance to pass gun legislation, arguing that they are (purportedly) ineffective. For instance, some pundits have argued that the massive stockpile of firearms in Americans hands renders firearms sales legislation impotent.
It isn't a public health issue, it is a criminology issue among other things. This paragraph is just stupid.
The available evidence suggests otherwise. One major public health study found that the risk of homicide in neighborhoods located near a gun retailer was almost 13 times higher than in those situated far from one. Another assessment found that the lapse of the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004 was responsible for a surge in the homicide rate of more than 16.4 percent across the border in Mexico.
This is one of the invalid studies mentioned above. Since the AWB did not ban anything, and "assault weapons" are used in less than three percent of all crimes, I seriously doubt it.
Still another scientific article found that homicide rates in Mexican municipalities near California, where a state-level assault weapons ban was still in effect after 2004, rose less than in municipalities near other U.S. border states. A forthcoming study links the lapse of Missouri’s background check law to an annual rise of 60 murders.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The cities near the borders are disputed trade routes, that is why there is violence. Since many of the weapons are automatic weapons either clandestinely manufactured or stolen from Mexican military, the AWB had nothing to do with. Also, residents are taking up arms to stand up to the cartels and the corrupt cops and military that protect them.
It is worth recalling that the stock of guns, like that of any other commodity, depreciates over time and must be replenished to remain at constant levels. The ATF was responsible for overseeing the release of more than 100 million firearms into the market between 1986 and 2011, and will likely be responsible for many more than that in the next 25 years.
And?
Some pundits claim that the true cause of gun violence in the United States has nothing to do with firearms at all. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people, they say. Armed violence is thus traced to other latent factors in American communities and individual psychological dispositions. Among the many reasons mobilized for gun-related violence is the poor state of mental health care.
Most leading criminologists and non ideologe with any critical thinking skills thinks this.
I deleted the paragraphs with the usual scapegoat "mentally ill" and video games nonsense.
While citizens bear the costs, it is ultimately the manufacturers, retailers, and marketers that profit from the country´s tsunami of gun violence. What do the numbers tell us? Some 32,163 Americans died of gunshot wounds in 2011. Another 70,000 more were non-fatally injured in the same year, and suffer debilitating physical and psychological scars. The economic cost of those losses has been estimated at $47 billion annually.
29K of which are suicides..
This grossly exceeds the industry’s economic benefit, as (generously) calculated by the National Shooting Sports Federation, by some $18 billion per year. Moreover, from 2006-2013, up to 120,000 Mexicans were murdered, roughly 50 percent of them by guns.
Environmental projects funded by the 11 percent tax. Mexico's gun murder rate is closer to 20 percent.
e most part, dIf we assume that the ATF’s sample of illegal firearms seized in Mexico, 68 percent of which were traced to sales in the United States, is representative of the country’s total holdings, we might say that roughly 3,700 Mexicans are intentionally killed by Americans guns annually. A back-of-the-envelope calculation using Mexico’s current per capita GDP of $11,000 implies an additional $1.5 billion in lifetime lost income in that country alone. While these are rough estimates they make a sharp point: the beneficiaries of the industry have a voice in Washington; the losers, for tho not.
Out of total guns seized, Mexico gave 24 percent to the ATF for tracing because of US manufacture or had markings showing it been imported in the US at one time. Out of that number, about half could be traced, and 68 percent of that number could be traced to the US. Most of those are about 20 years old. The number of those guns that were in NCIC as reported stolen is unknown. What about the 76 percent the Mexicans didn't give to the ATF? They were either stolen from the Mexican military or obviously not from the US.
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