Every day I wake up and pray that there will not be another mass killing in our country. When I think of the pathos and horror of the victims' final seconds I shake my head and hold back my tears. The situation is unbearable and should be fixed.
We trap ourselves into debate about how to do it. What is the most effective way to reduce these awful incidents? Should we ban assault style weapons? Tighten security checks? I recently read a diary promoting liability insurance as a condition of gun ownership.
But how big a problem is gun ownership? If we ban all guns, round them up and destroy them, what will be the benefit and what will be the cost?
My source for the statistics used in my argument:
Top 10 Causes of Death
To put this into some type of perspective, 2.4 million people die in the US every year. Of these deaths, 31,000 are gun related or 1.3%. Now of the 31,000 gun related deaths, 20,000 are suicides. It is doubtful that a gun ban will eliminate all of these deaths.
So we now have 11,000 annual non suicide gun deaths. Some of these are gun accidents but I couldn't find the rate for this. What I did find that was interesting was the number of homicides that involved hand guns is around 8,000. The other critical factor is the age of the person in possesion of the gun. People under 35 are much more likely to commit homicide and of course a gun makes this much easier.
Wiki file
So we could ban all guns and save around 11,000 lives per year. Or we could ban assault weapons and save around 1,000 lives per year. Or we could ban handguns for people under 35 and save 8,000 lives per year.
Now if we banned automobiles, we could save 33,000 lives a year from accidents, eliminate tons of carbon emmissions and improve the health of everyone. But do we really want to do that? Naw, most of us own cars and are pretty addicted to them. But only a few of us own guns and it's much easier to make someone else give up something you have no interest in rather than look at the facts and make an effort to understand.