The Violence Policy Center
released a survey Thursday showing that the District of Columbia and 12 states scattered across all regions of the nation had more gun deaths than motor vehicle-related deaths in 2010. That is the last year for which state data via the federal Centers for Disease Control are available. The 25-year-old VPC has long sought to make gun violence a public health issue.
[In 2010] gun deaths (including gun suicide, homicide, and fatal unintentional shootings) outpaced motor vehicle deaths in: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and Washington (see table below for additional information). [...]
While the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is charged with
enforcing our nation’s limited gun laws, it has none of the health and safety regulatory powers afforded other federal agencies such as [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration].
As Dr. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, notes in his 2004 book Private Guns, Public Health: “[T]he time Americans spend using their cars is orders of magnitudes greater than the time spent using their guns. It is probable that per hour of exposure, guns are far more dangerous. Moreover, we have lots of safety regulations concerning the manufacture of motor vehicles; there are virtually no safety regulations for domestic firearms manufacture.”
Although firearms fatalities of all sorts remain high, a Department of Justice
report released this month showed a drop in the number of murders committed with a firearm fell 39 percent to 11,101 in 2011, from a high of 18,253 in 1993. But the low point actually occurred in 1999, when gun murders hit 10,117. Since then, such murders have remained on a plateau, although the rate of gun murders per 100,000 population has dropped because of the population increase.
Firearms incidents, the number of victims and the firearm crime rate have also dropped significantly since 1993, although not in a linear fashion. Firearms crimes as a percentage of all crimes are, however, the same as they were in 1993, eight percent.
Below the fold, see what VPC has to say about reducing the number of gun deaths.
Bringing the number down further, the Violence Policy Center says, will require new policies, many of which have received a lengthy public airing in the past few months without anything being passed at the federal level. These policies would include:
• Collecting details in a timely fashion on firearms production, sales and use in crime
• Setting minimum safety standards for firearms both in design and mandated safety devices
• Banning certain guns that the VPC says have "no sporting purpose." That would include military-style semi-automatic rifles
• Limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines
• Banning firearms possession by people likely to misuse them, for example, anyone convicted of a violent misdemeanor.
Some states already have passed one set of laws the VPC is suggesting, such as the "assault weapons" bans in California, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland, and magazine capacity limits in those states as well as Colorado.
