The Lowdown » gun violence http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown Decoding the news Wed, 22 May 2013 19:13:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5 America’s Mass Shooting Dilemma http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/04/05/the-mass-shootings-problem/ http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/04/05/the-mass-shootings-problem/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:50:49 +0000 Matthew Green http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/?p=7297 Continue reading →]]> Source: Mother Jones

Source: Mother Jones

In the last 30 years, there have been at least 62 mass shootings in 30 states, from Hawaii to Massachusetts.

That’s according to reporting by Mother Jones, which produced a comprehensive series examining gun deaths and gun control in America (in which mass shootings are defined as incidents where four or more people are murdered in a public place).

Next week, the U.S. Senate begins debate on a set of gun control proposals that came about largely in response to the mass shooting last December at Sandy Hook. While lawmakers remain fiercely divided on the issue, there remains, at least, a general acknowledgement that mass shootings happen far too frequently in this country, and that action of some kind is needed to prevent future tragedies of such magnitude.

While mass shooting deaths make up only a small percentage of America’s total gun homicides, they’ve occurred with alarming frequency in recent years, an anomaly among other industrialized nations.

In the U.S., 25 mass shootings have happened since 2006. The most recent tragedy, at Sandy Hook, was the seventh mass shooting in 2012 alone. More than 75 percent of the guns used in all these shootings were purchased legally, a point that helped recently renew the debate on a federal assault weapon ban — although that proposal now appears to be dead in the water.

The map below, produced by Mother Jones as part of its series, shows the location and specific details of each incident. Visit the site to see a detailed timeline of these incidents and the shooters involved.

]]> http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/04/05/the-mass-shootings-problem/feed/ 0 Source: Mother Jones U.S. Gun Homicides: Visualizing the Numbers http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/03/07/u-s-gun-deaths-visualizing-the-numbers/ http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/03/07/u-s-gun-deaths-visualizing-the-numbers/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:10:37 +0000 Matthew Green http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/?p=5947 Source: Factcheck.org Compared to other high-income nations in the world, America isn’t unusually violent; we’re just unusually lethal. That’s according to David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He argues there is a direct connection between the U.S. being leaps and bounds ahead of any other industrialized country in terms of overall … Continue reading →]]> Source: Factcheck.org

Source: Factcheck.org

Compared to other high-income nations in the world, America isn’t unusually violent; we’re just unusually lethal.

That’s according to David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He argues there is a direct connection between the U.S. being leaps and bounds ahead of any other industrialized country in terms of overall gun death rates and gun homicides — and the fact that we have the highest gun-ownership rates in the world

“We are a nation which does not have more crime or more violence,” Hemenway said during a forum on gun violence held shortly after the Newtown shooting. “We are an average nation in terms of assault, robbery, and (non-firearms) homicides.” What distinguishes the U.S., he notes, is our rate of gun violence: “The United States has a very horrific gun problem … 85 people a day dying from guns from all sorts of injury … Compared to the other developed countries, we are just doing terribly.”

Below are a handful of particularly striking gun homicide stats, based on 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scroll over the charts below for additional information.

*Note that stats on gun deaths vary depending on which government agency is reporting them.

31,672
Total firearms deaths in 2010 (about 86% male).

11,078
Total gun homicides (about 70% of all the murders committed).

3.59
Gun murder rate per 100,000 population (Japan’s rate is about .01)

85
U.S. gun deaths per day (about 3 each hour).

4,588
Number of people aged 15 to 29 killed by violence in 2010.

15.34
Rate of African American gun murders. For blacks aged 15 to 29, it was the leading cause of death – a rate of 36.6.

The U.S. gun murder rate — which is now actually at its lowest level since the early 1980′s — is still more than double that of any other wealthy nation in the world.

Hemenway notes that a child in the U.S is about 13 times more likely to be a victim of a firearm-related homicide than children in most other industrialized nations.

Firearms were the third leading cause of injury-related deaths nationwide in 2010, following poisoning and motor vehicle accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the sake of comparison, in 2010 there were more than twice as many firearms deaths in the U.S. than terrorism-related deaths worldwide.

The following visualization, produced by Periscopic, uses data from the F.B.I’s Uniform Crime Report (which reported 9,595 homicides for 2010, but did not include data from Florida and Alabama), in an attempt to calculate the years of life stolen from gun murder victims. Each strand in the graph below represents a person killed by gun violence. Visit their site to explore the data by sex, age group and region.

This map, produced by NBC News as part of its gun violence series, provides a sobering look at all the gun-related deaths (homicides, suicides, and accidental) that occurred over this year’s  Martin Luther King holiday weekend. Click on the image to view the map interactively on NBC’s site. Below that is a clip reporting the various instances of gun homicides over the course of that one bloody weekend.

]]> http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/03/07/u-s-gun-deaths-visualizing-the-numbers/feed/ 1 Source: Factcheck.org