Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: Gun-control mistakes [View all]krispos42
(49,445 posts)The first graph is a simple one. It's simply the homicide rate from guns, the homicide rate from not-guns, the total homicide rate, and the ratio of gun to non-gun, which I thought was a bit interesting. Anyway, it's from 1985 to 2017, sources are on the graph. I had to copy-and-paste the data into a spreadsheet year-by-year, which was irritating and time-consuming, but, hey, you're worth it.
The second graph is a bit busier. It's the homicide rate by gun type (as stated by the Federal government; they have 5 classifications) versus the non-gun homicide rate.
I've also added some slightly older graphs I made showing gun sales per capita. The first one is total sales, the second one is broken down by type (handgun, rifle, & shotgun only; I didn't include "other" ), and the third is the percentage relative to 1986. In other words, 1986 is "zero" on the graph, and the vertical axis is in percent above or below 1986 levels. As you can see, despite a surge in sales of handguns and rifles, the homicide rate went DOWN sharply and has remained fairly low.
Looking at the second graph, you can see the purple line. That's rifles, all rifles, including the subset of rifles that is considered "assault weapons" by any definition you care to use. Remember, an "assault weapon" can be either a rifle, a pistol, or a shotgun, but is usually a rifle. What you and other people like you are worrying about and trying to "do" something about is far, far lower than non-gun homicides.
Between 1985 and 2017, 507,388 people were murdered in this country. 15,545 of them were murdered with rifles, or 3.1%.
The highest per-capita rate in my spreadsheet for rifles is .323 per 100,000, which means that one person out of 309,297 in America was killed with a rifle; this was in 1989. The lowest was in 2015, when 1 in 1,495,701 Americans were killed with a rifle.
The worst year for mean time between homicides was in 1993, when there was an average of 23.7 minutes between murders. The best was 2014, with a mean time of 45.3 minutes. Note that the US population had increased by 23% in that time period!
These spree shootings are media-intensive and tragic, but you are talking about spending an enormous effort politically to address the hardware aspect of a social problem! A social problem caused, in large part, by liberals and progressives NOT being in charge to fix the social problems! Or being too centrist to address the root social problems.
More people are deciding to commit spree shootings. More in absolute numbers, and more per capita. It's called "stochastic terrorism". Searches for this term skyrocketed after the recent shooting in El Paso.
Trying to take away hardware is not going to stop them because they don't have logical or reasonable goals. "I was going to shoot up a Cosco, but since I didn't have an AR-15 I decided to stay home and troll the libtards on the internet" is NOT going to be the outcome of an AWB. These stupid bastards will do it anyway. Perhaps with an AR-15 modified to NOT be an "assault weapon". Did you know you can buy pump-action AR-15s now? Or with several handguns; you can buy 4 or five decent-quality handguns for the price of an AR-15, and simply keep drawing a new one each time you shoot one empty rather than reload.