Gun Deaths Today Surpass Those In Our Bloodiest War
By MIKE WEISSER JUNE 12, 2016 5:15 PM
... If we really want to compare wartime casualties to contemporary gun deaths, we should look at the Civil War, which had the most American casualties of any war in our nation’s history. The body count from the Civil War — believed to be 625,000 — accounts for nearly half of all military deaths that have occurred over the course of our nation’s history (recent scholarship may push that number even higher, to 700,000 or more). How could anyone imagine that today’s gun violence, which claims 30,000+ lives each year, would hold a candle to the loss of life that took place between 1861 and 1865?
When you look at the numbers, you can see just how violent we are today. By my calculations, we currently suffer more gun deaths than occurred during the bloodiest war in our entire history, and it has been going on for far longer than the fifty months of the Civil War.
To begin, less than one-third of the military deaths during the War of the Rebellion had anything to do with guns — or any kind of violence at all. According to the 1870 report issued by the Surgeon General, nearly 200,000 Federal troops perished from diseases, like typhus, influenza and other illnesses that came from unclean water, rotten food and communicable bacteria of all kinds. The number of Union soldiers who died on the battlefield, or from wounds suffered in battle, was much smaller: roughly 90,000. Our figures for the rebel side are much less exact, but historians believe that an even greater proportion of Confederate troops died from disease than those that died in and behind Union lines.
Despite the fact that a majority of troops on both sides died from causes other than guns wounds, the Civil War gun death numbers provide a sobering perspective on the rate of civilian gun violence today versus gun violence during the most violent of all our wars. The total number of Union soldiers killed by gunfire between 1861 and 1865 was somewhere around 90,000. Add the accepted estimates of Confederate battle casualties and we wind up somewhere south of 140,000 for the number who were killed on both sides during the war. Looking at the four years between 2011-2014, the total number of Americans killed by guns was 133,149, and adjusting to cover the same 50-month period of the Civil War would bring the contemporary gun death total to more than 140,000 ...
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/gun-deaths-today-surpass-those-in-our-bloodiest-war/
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