misguided attentions

In writing up a comment for yet another of Weer’d “Gun Death?” articles, I stumbled across something rather interesting.

We all know that WISQARS keeps track of the number, intent, and mechanism of fatal injuries across the country, but did you know that they also track non-fatal injuries? Being as interested in numbers as I am, I could not help but to fool around a little…

Using the Leading Causes of Death tool, and limiting it to 2007; the top 20 causes; all age groups, genders, and ethnicities; and only violence-related injuries, one discovers a predictable chart giving us these numbers:

17,352 people took their own lives using firearms.
12,632 people were murdered by other people using firearms.
1,981 people were murdered by people using cutting/piercing implements.
619 people took their own lives using a cutting/piercing implement.

As I said, fairly expected numbers.

Now head on over to the Leading Causes of Nonfatal Injuries tool, and set it to 2007 (so we compare like years); top 20 causes; all age groups, genders, and ethnicities; and violence-related injuries, and you get these figures:

93,325 people were injured in an assault by other people wielding cutting/piercing implements.
77,024 people hurt themselves with a cutting/piercing implment.
48,676 people were injured in an assault by other people wielding a firearm.
4,291 people hurt themselves with a firearm.

Both of those datasets understandably omitted deaths and injuries resulting from legal intervention, for obvious reasons, and all of these fatalities and injuries are violence-related, which rules out accidents.

So why am I putting these numbers up? I find them interesting – you are more than welcome, however, to draw your own conclusions. We can note a few things, though – when it comes to “lives being impacted” by inanimate tools being wielded by those with malicious intent, knives certainly have the upper hand. This calls into question the anti-rights bigots claims that they are working to ensure “public safety”… if that were the case, why not go after the tool that accounts for more total injuries, and that does not have a Constitutional amendment specifically protecting it. I mean, that is working so well in once-Great Britain.

Moving on, suicides are a complicated topic – a lot of them are committed by people who do not really want to kill themselves, a lot of them are committed by people who want attention, and a lot of them are attempts that go wrong… and vice versa. The simple truth is that firearms are significantly more effective for killing yourself than a knife, so more people who are interested in doing the job right the first time use them. However, banning firearms does not make the suicides that would have been committed with firearms simply go away – in point of fact, people who do want to kill themselves do find other means:

When the firearm suicide rate for Australian males declined the hanging rate increased simultaneously, with no statistical difference in the rate of change of the two methods.

The better method of preventing suicides is unquestionably intervention and prevention strategies, rather than banning an inanimate object. Likewise, anti-rights bigots are demonstrably selective when it comes to firearm-to-suicide relationships:

One study found a statistically significant relationship between gun ownership levels and suicide rate across 14 developed nations (e.g. where survey data on gun ownership levels were available), but the association lost its statistical significance when additional countries were included.

Of course, this all disregards my own personal take on the matter of suicide, but that is another topic for another post.

Finally, firearms are demonstrably more-lethal than knives. However, if one were to take all injuries inflicted by knives, and all injuries inflicted by firearms (both fatal and non-fatal), knives are far in the lead when it comes to “being used by malicious individuals for aggressive purposes”. Do people honestly believe that those criminally-inclined individuals who used to use firearms will simply give up their life of crime, in totality, if firearms were banned in America? Or will they instead cast-about for another form of force-multiplying tool, and use that instead? Thankfully, once-Great Britain again provides us the answer:

That means that, based on these statistics, you are more than twice as likely to be a victim of knife crime in the UK as you are to be a victim of gun crime in the US.

And then there is the obvious bit about once-Great Britain having the highest violent crime rate in the EU – a rate that is higher than even America’s, and a rate that has been steadily increasing since the 1920s, despite (or perhaps due to) increasingly tightening restrictions on firearms.

So there is your daily dose of random numbers – numbers that, in the end, do not really matter. Self-defense is a natural right, regardless of whatever statistics might say about its outcome.