This is not an invitation to a pie fight. Real scientific data on the subject is scarce, so when I ran across some, I decided to post it when convenient. It is convenient.
This comes from Michael Shermer's "Skeptic" column in the May 2013 issue of Scientific American. The title is:
Gun Science
How data can help clarify the gun-control debate
A version is
Here, but the subtitle is different from that in the print mag, and some of the contents may be as well.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 31,672 people died by guns in the U.S. in 2010. Per Mr. Shermer, his is vastly higher than in comparable Western democracies.
Mr. Shermer also cites a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery to the effect that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”
He then calls our attention to a 2013 book entitled Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Johns Hopkins University Press). The book was edited by two professors in health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick. (ooooh, the Devil and Daniel Webster)
Information he gleans from the above book includes that in 2010 there were also 73,505 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for non-fatal gunshot wounds and 337,960 non-fatal violent crimes committed with guns. The last bit of information I will post here (there is more) is that 54% of those killed by their intimate partners were killed with guns, but in states that outlaw gun ownership by men who have been hit with domestic violence restraining orders, gun-caused homicides of intimate female partners have been reduced by 25 percent.