It's been well over a year since the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary. Even longer than that since the Aurora Colorado theater shooting, and the attempted assassination of Gabriel Gifford's in Phoenix. Each of these situations galvanized public attention to the damage that easy access to guns could inflict, but none were able to spark a significant change in policies to help keep Americans safer. Efforts to limit magazine capacity, access to military styled weapons, and close background-check loopholes have been stymied. In fact, in some states gun laws actually became more lax as a result of such events, under the "one good man with a gun" theory.
Yet, in none of these cases did such a "good" man appear. In Arizona the gunman was stopped by unarmed persons as he attempted to reload. (Hence the push to limit capacity and increase the odds for such heroic action). In Colorado the gunman surrendered peace fully when confronted by police. But the most common of outcomes it that which we saw in Connecticut, and also in Virginia Tech, and at Columbine.
Suicide.
I do not believe we will make major headway in gun safety until we recognize the very simple and obvious fact that the majority of those killed by guns, are in fact suicides using weapons that were legally bought.
More than 19,000 of the 31,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, far more than the number of homicides or unintended shooting deaths. The overall suicide rate is rising so rapidly that it now outnumbers deaths from car crashes. Most recently, health officials noted a startling spike in suicides among middle-aged Americans: they have jumped by 28 percent from 1999 to 2010.
Although our attention is often focused by the high casualty rate of mass shootings, in raw numbers the body count of gun suicides far outstrips any mass shooting we could ever imagine. Maybe it's time we starting putting our attention on were the bodies are piling up.
Although guns were used in 68% of all homicides in 2010, the gun homicide total of 11,078 only amounted to 35% of all gun deaths. This is of course a serious issue and it has been where nearly all of our gun safety efforts have been focused for decades, but it pales when compared to the number of suicides per year.
http://smartgunlaws.org/...
Firearms were used in 19,392 suicides in the U.S. in 2010, constituting almost 62% of all gun deaths.10
Over 50% of all suicides are committed with a firearm.11
White males, about 40% of the U.S. population, accounted for over 80% of firearm suicides in 2010.13
Which indicates that White males are far more likely to kill themselves with their own gun, than they have to worry and fear that they may be assaulted or killed by the likes of Trayvon Martin or Richard Sherman.
A study of California handgun purchasers found that in the first year after the purchase of a handgun, suicide was the leading cause of death among the purchasers.
Now the NRA view of things would be that you need a person with a gun, to stop another person with a gun - however, if that persons primary goal is to
kill themselves how exactly does another person threatening them with a firearm help in that situation?
Yet that is the fact of the matter in Six-Two Percent of Gun Deaths.
Gun rights advocates would rather attempt to focus on gang shootings as opposed to suicides or cases of domestic violence where guns are used to threaten and murder a spouse and children, but the fact is that gang-shootings only result in death is about ONE TENTH the number of suicides...
Via the National Gang Center
The total number of gang homicides reported by respondents in the NYGS sample averaged more than 1,900 annually from 2007 to 2011
And this is still only a fraction of the total number of homicides during the same period.
During the same time period, the FBI estimated, on average, more than 15,500 homicides across the United States ( http://www.fbi.gov/... ). These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 12 percent of all homicides annually.
Even the focus of accidental shootings in our own series of #GunFail articles while addressing a legitimate point are unfortunately obscuring the larger point with relative trivia.
In 2010, unintentional firearm injuries caused the deaths of 606 people.
Clearly more people survive than die from these types of shootings, but the key issue in these isn't the number of times it happens - it's
where it's more likely to happen.
People of all age groups are significantly more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries when they live in states with more guns, relative to states with fewer guns. On average, states with the highest gun levels had nine times the rate of unintentional firearms deaths compared to states with the lowest gun levels.
Certainly every death matters, particular to the person involved, their friends and family, but if you simply look at this from a
cause perspective 606 accidental gun deaths is less than 1/3rd of 1,900 gang gun killings which is just 1/10th of the 19,078 gun suicides per year - yet we're spending all of our time and energy on the 606 or the 1,900 but
NOT ON THE 19,000!?
If our goal is to reduce all preventable gun deaths why not start at the place where they are the genuinely most prevalent?
As wrong as NRA thinking may be on the idea that all we need to stop gun violence is more people with guns, because clearly the opposite is true with accidental shootings, their continued focus on those with mental health and emotional issues may not be entirely off base.
Obviously some other measures need to be taken than simply limiting magazine rounds. In many of these cases background checks were used and passed as few of these persons had prior criminal records. In order to address this we may need some new strategies which better coordinate the efforts of mental health and law enforcement professionals. Although this was technically not a suicide case - it may have been an attempted "murder/suicide by cop" - the particulars are still relevant when looking at the situation of Jared Loughner, who had been flagged as dangerous by his college counselor and expelled until he sought medical help. His parents, although they felt him grow increasingly erratic after his expulsion and the loss of his job never sought such treatment even after they were so alarmed that his father took his shotgun away from him. The school never did anything to provide him care since he was no longer a student, and neither did they inform local police or health professionals of his situation.
There should have been some way for mental health professionals and/or campus law enforcement to limit or impact his ability to gain access to weapons until it was shown that he was no longer a danger to others or himself. Unfortunately under our current laws, that isn't possible unless a judge makes that determination.
Absent such an ability it's been generally stated that the school acted "appropriately" in a manner to protect itself and it's students, but in the process did nothing to protect the community at large. The same can be said of the handling of Virginia Tech Shooter Seung Hoi-Cho.
Cho had previously been diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder. During much of his middle school and high school years, he received therapy and special education support. After graduating from high school, Cho enrolled at Virginia Tech. Because of federal privacy laws, Virginia Tech was unaware of Cho's previous diagnosis or the accommodations he had been granted at school. In 2005, Cho was accused of stalking two female students. After an investigation, a Virginia special justice declared Cho mentally ill and ordered him to attend treatment.[5] Lucinda Roy, a professor and former chairwoman of the English department, had asked Cho to seek counseling.[6]
But as we all know he didn't seek treatment and he didn't seek counseling, not before he committed the 2nd most deadly school shooting in U.S. history and then committed suicide.
The story of James Egan Holmes, the Aurora Theater shooter, who since he has been arrested and held without bail until his trial has attempted suicide multiple times.
CBS News later reported that Holmes met with at least three mental health professionals at the University of Colorado prior to the massacre.
One of Holmes' psychiatrists suspected prior to the shooting that Holmes suffered from mental illness and could be dangerous. A month before the shooting, Dr. Lynne Fenton reported to the campus police that he had made homicidal statements which indicated he was a threat to the public.[45] Despite the fact that she was seeing him as a patient, she decided not to hospitalize him for saying he wanted to kill people. Her reasoning is unknown. Other acquaintances also feared Holmes was violent. Two weeks prior to the shooting, he sent a text message asking a graduate student if they had heard of the disorder dysphoric mania, and warning the student to stay away from him "because I am bad news".
These of course are the high profile cases that have garnered our national attention, but little do we notice the suicidal and mental health coincidences which continue to pile up not just in these mass shootings, but in tens of thousands of other cases every year.
A few weeks ago, after his arrest for assault and pointing his weapons at his girl-friend we learned that law enforcement had taken away all of George Zimmerman's Guns, yet even after counseling had ordered in the cases of Loughner, Cho and Holmes a similar judgement couldn't have been made in their cases? Even if we had universal background checks available, would that alone have stopped any of them from acquiring and retaining their weapons? Clearly there are major issues of privacy that need to be addressed here, but some kind of public safety options need to be looked at when someone - even in a school setting - has shown signs of suicidal or homicidal action that would temporarily bar their access to weapons for the exact same reasons that Loughner was expelled and Cho was determined to be mentally ill and ordered to seek treatment.
This is the argument that the NRA makes, that the average law-abiding gun-owners is no danger, and that the "madmen" are the problem. Maybe it's time to call them on that bluff.
There has to be something, legally, rationally and within the confines of the Constitution, that can be done to reduce the number of these deaths. If even something could only reduce it a fraction, it would far outstrip the number of gang gun murders nation-wide. A 50% reduction would be an amazing feet.
It seems to me such an obviously target even when you query right-wing sources they agree that that rate of gun suicides far outstrip all other gun crimes.
http://usconservatives.about.com/...
There are roughly 32,000 gun deaths per year in the United States. Of those, around 60% are suicides. About 3% are accidental deaths (less than 1,000). About 34% of deaths (just over 11,000 in both 2010 and 2011) make up the remainder of gun deaths.
This, as I've already shown, is completely true - but this article while admitting that the majority of gun deaths are in fact
suicides then proceeds to say little more about that fact before it goes off the rails by proclaiming that our biggest gun problems, comes from gangs.
To hear gun control advocates speak, one would be led to believe that gun violence is a widespread problem whereby the mere existence of a gun is as much a problem as the person who intends to wield it. But the reality is that gun homicides are overwhelmingly tied to gang violence. In fact, a staggering 80% of gun homicides are gang-related. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), gang homicides accounted for roughly 8,900 of 11,100 gun murders in both 2010 and 2011. That means that there were just 2,200 non gang-related firearm murders in both years in a country of over 300 million people and 250 million guns.
..
Solve the problem of gang violence, and a huge chunk of the gun homicide and violence problem is solved. And what national gun control measures would slow the gang violence problem, when local gun control laws have failed in cities like Chicago? If politicians were really worried about gun deaths, wouldn't they be specifically targeting where a majority of the problems exist?
If you actually bother to read the CDC pdf, which I did, it does not confirm this claim that there were only 2,200 non-gang related firearms murders in 2010-2011. It doesn't even
mention gangs in the entire report. (It's searchable - maybe I'm dumb, but I couldn't find anything on "Gangs") As shown above the actual rate of gang gun deaths is less than 2,000 per year, in which case the assumptions made by this report are exactly backwards. The vast majority of gun murders are NOT gang related.
The CDC report does confirm that the suicide gun rate for 2011 was 19,766, it shows that the number of gun homicides is 11,101, but also that the rate of non-gun homicides is 4,852, which is less than half that figure. Death by accidental discharge off firearms (#GunFail) were only 851 in 2011 according to the CDC. Injury by firearm was 32,163.
This yet again confirms that suicide by gun should be our primary focus and not gun deaths by gangs. This may be why policies such as Stop-N-Frisk or 3-Strikes Sentencing have not really done a great deal to bring down our gun death rate, since they aren't addressing the route cause of those deaths. And once we admit that suicide is the leading cause of gun deaths, and eliminate gangs as a primary source of gun murder - just what is the secondary cause of gun shooting and killings in the U.S.?
Could it be Domestic Disputes? http://smartgunlaws.org/...
Guns increase the probability of death in incidents of domestic violence.1
Firearms were used to kill more than two-thirds of spouse and ex-spouse homicide victims between 1990 and 2005.2
Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily force.3
Abused women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser owns a firearm.4
A recent survey of female domestic violence shelter residents in California found that more than one third (36.7%) reported having been threatened or harmed with a firearm.5 In nearly two thirds (64.5%) of the households that contained a firearm, the intimate partner had used the firearm against the victim, usually threatening to shoot or kill the victim.
And what if we expand that view from one-on-one cases to include mass shootings that are domestically inspired?
http://www.alternet.org/...
February 24, 2013 | A new analysis of 56 mass shootings across America since 2009 finds women and family members are the most frequent victims, and that the shooter almost always acquired his guns legally, in cases where the gun source is known.
“In at least 32 of the cases (57 percent), the shooter killed a current or former spouse or intimate partner or other family member, and at least eight of those shooters had a prior domestic violence charge,” the Mayors Against Illegal Guns report on mass shootings said, suggesting that the problem of gun violence is far more related to violence against women in homes than rampages in public settings such as schools and theaters.
The study also found that in the cases where the source of the guns was known, almost all were acquired legally: only two examples were given of mass killings with a stolen or illegal gun. That finding runs counter to the gun lobby’s oft-cited rhetoric that only criminals abuse guns.
So it's simply not true that legal gun owners can be blindly trusted to handle their guns with care. Some can, but quite a few
can't. We frequently react to mass shootings when they occur in unexpected places like a school, an office, a church or theater, but by far the most common of murder/suicide mass shootings, is
in the home of a current or former spouse.
Unfortunately the stats are hard to compare to the numbers we already have to get a look a the scope of the problem compared to the overall gun-death rate. However i did find these numbers from the Violence Policy Center, although they are for overall murders and are not filtered for gun-deaths. http://www.vpc.org/...
Nationwide, 1,707 females were murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents in 2011, at a rate of 1.17 per 100,000. For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 94 percent of female victims were murdered by a male they knew.
Sixteen times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,509 victims) than were killed by male strangers (92 victims). Among victims who knew their offenders, 61 percent of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.
Looking further at the PDF from the VPC on Murder-Suicides I discovered this.
http://www.vpc.org/...
Medical studies estimate that between 1,000 and 1,500 deaths per year in the United States are the result of murder-suicide.3 This VPC analysis reveals that, in the first half of 2005, there were 591 murder-suicide deaths, of which 264 were suicides and 327 were homicides. Using these figures, more than 10 murder-suicide events occur in the United States each week. Of the 264 suicides, 248 were male and 16 were female. Of the 327 homicides, 255 victims were female and 72 victims were male. Included in the homicide victims were 47 children and teens less than 18 years of age. By doubling the total number of fatalities during the six-month period for a yearly estimate, there were an estimated 1,182 murder-suicide deaths in 2005.
...
The most common type of murder-suicide was between two intimate partners,f
with the man killing his wife or girlfriend because of a breakdown in their relationship.9
In this study, 74 percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner. Of these,
96 percent were females killed by their intimate partners. In comparison, in 2003—the
most recent data available—for all murders (where the relationship could be
determined) 17 percent of murder victims were killed by an intimate partner.10 Of
these, 78 percent were females killed by their intimate partners.11
This type of murder-suicide typically involves a man between the ages of 18
and 60 years old who develops suspicions of his girlfriend’s or wife’s infidelity,
becomes enraged, murders her, and then commits suicide—usually using a firearm.12
Often, he will also kill the children of himself and the intimate partner.
So what we see here in terms of one-on-one violence that the numbers in domestic situations and murder-suicides of an entire family are very close to those found in gang gun situations. About 1,000-1500 gun deaths per year. In short, our "gang murder epidemic" is only slightly worst than our domestic murder epidemic and IMO should be treated with equal levels of urgency. If we can have
gang prevention task forces established coast to coast - perhaps we should also treat domestic violence as just a virulent a crisis and epidemic.
Somehow I'm not expecting that to happen, though.
Still a significant reduction in either of these wouldn't give us anywhere near the benefit of reducing gun suicides. But what else could and perhaps should we be addressing? Although it too isn't filtered only for gun homicides, but rather all murders, the FBI does provide a breakdown of the relationships and circumstances for Murder in 2011.
We've been repeatedly told that we should fear the use of guns during a crime and our laws reflect a tendency to immediate throw away the key when a gun is used during commission of the felony. How many times out of the 12,664 Murders in 2011 (2/3rd of which, 8,653 were using firearms) was that crime connected to another felony?
1,816.
And what were the top five types of those felonies?
Robbery 734, Other Not Specified 494, Narcotic Drug Laws 390, Burglary 92, Suspected Felony Type 60.
Ok, so how many were there that were not otherwise felonies?
5, 976 with the remainder, 4,812 Unknown.
And what were the top ten of those we know were not felonies?
Other Arguments 3,128, Other Not Specified 1,647, Juvenile Gang Killings 523, Argument over money or property 155, Gangland Killings 150, Brawl due to influence of narcotics 115, Brawl due to influence of alcohol 111, Romantic Triangle 85, Child killed by babysitter 39, institutional Killings 22.
Once again the FBI confirms that the number of both Juvenile (523) and Adult "Gang Killings" (150, creating a total of 673 - which is beaten by "other not specified" by almost 3 to 1) are certainly not the most dramatic and recalcitrant type of murder we have to face in this country. Not even close compared to 3,128 killings that result from arguments only 708 of which are with strangers.
This is not to say that gang violence and murder are trivial, but to suggest that we keep it all in perspective. People killed in brawls due to narcotics is nearly the same as the number of people killed in brawls due to alcohol - yet alcohol use is Legal,while most narcotics including marijuana are illegal. Where exactly, is the "balance" here?
It may seem silly to suggest, but if most our murders happen during the commission of NON-FELONIES then perhaps our focus on trying to link these shootings to violent crime is somewhat misguided. If in fact that largest single majority of killings in this country beside suicides and domestic disputes don't come from a criminal in the process of committing an illegal act but instead come from ARGUMENTS between otherwise law abiding people, who more often than not may have gained access to weapons used to commit these murders using completely legal means it truly begs the question, what help - if any - will background checks and/or magazine limits make when more often than not people having a dispute over otherwise innocuous issues are causing a far greater number of murders than gangs and criminal inspired murders combined?
Perhaps, like a new policy on gun access for those mental health professionals have already determined are dangerous - we may need to look at not just restraining orders for physical proximity when people show indications of growing personal animus, we may need to start thinking and talking about weapons restraint for those people who've at least shown some signs that they may need anger management or counseling.
I don't begin to pretend I have all the answers, I only know that the data in aggregate doesn't really support the strategies that have been pursued to curtail this problem. We seem able to move heaven and earth, to be able to turn the 4th amendment upside-down and backwards with policies like Stop-N-Frisk where we know 98% of those searches will not produce a weapon, turning hundreds of thousands of innocent minority men into permanent suspects, placing them under a constant siege mentality against their own government - but we can do nothing - NOTHING - to slow the growing body count of suicides and domestic murder-suicides that combined far outrace the death toll of any gang or youth violence?
I don't buy it that our hands are tied.
Even with all this I do believe in a strong and vibrant 2nd Amendment precisely for the same reasons that many in the NRA proclaims to believe in it. I do feel, that the ultimate right of individuals to bear and retain arms to stop the nation from failing into the hands of invasion, insurrection, totalitarianism and tyranny is a worthwhile goal. I would prefer the power of commitment, courage and non-violent persuasion shown by MLK, Ghandi and Occupy but I am ultimately a realist. In the worst possible of all scenarios, the 2nd Amendment exists to prevent the unthinkable.
However, while we reserve this ultimate right of self-protection and national service, we really can't sit by idly and let the day-to-day slaughter of our fellow citizens by their own emotional demons and the demons of others go by unchecked without a proportional, rational response. It can't be that we have to be expect to sit on our hands while tens of thousands of our fellow citizens suffer the consequences of far too easy access to far too powerful weapons without a logical, strategic and effective response.
This can't be what America has become. That is NOT the deal laid out in the Declaration of Independence. It's not what we have no choice but to accept. We can do better. We have to do better.
Vyan
10:30 AM PT: Ok, I found the gun specific section of the homicide tables so I can show the breakdown in relation to crimes for 2011. http://www.fbi.gov/... (This does not include suicides)
Total Homicides using Firearms 8,583
including Handguns 6,220. Rifles 323 Shotguns 356 Other Guns 1,684.
Felony Type: 1,271.
Including Robbery 553, Other Not Specific 324, Narcotics 318.
Non Felony 3,684.
Including Other Arguments 1,844, Other Not Specific 925, Juvenile Gang Killings 476, Gang Killings 143. Arguments over money or property 104.