Did you know that gun murders in the US has decreased 49% since 1993 while the number of legal guns in the US has increased from 170 million to 350 million as of 2013? (Pewsocialtrendsdotorg)
Neat!
Did you know that 1993, the peak time, had about 17,000 homicides by guns?
Did you know that 2017 has already reached 12,250, and we still have two months left?
Did you know that neither of those is actually an acceptable number?
Did you also know that 2016 saw 15,000 deaths and 30,000 injuries?
Did you know that medicine has progressed significantly in the past 20 years, so if all of those 30,000 people had been shot back in 1993, thousands more probably wouldn’t have made it? The rate ten years ago used to be 20% fatality in some areas, and then dropped down to 11%. If we do the math and adjust for only a 5% difference through the prior decade (25% fatality rate vs a modern-day 11%), there could have only been 7,000 gun-related deaths in 1993. Even using a national scale of 12%, we would only be looking at about 7,500. That’s a 50% decrease in death rates–which lines up, coincidentally, with the doubling of legal guns in the United States. If you want to do a hard adjustment, you’d probably be looking at 10,000-12,000 deaths–which we’ve already blown past in October of this year. Also, adjusting those numbers, if we had 1993′s medicine in 2016, we would be looking at about 18,000 people dead--more than 1993′s record.
Did you know that there were over 300 mass shootings in 2016 alone? Not 300 people shot in mass shootings–300 mass shootings. Obviously only a few were on a high scale, but even if you get five of those in a year, that’s five too many.
So please, continue bringing numbers into this debate, because you know what? Numbers don’t lie.
