The Truth: Gun Control Stats, Unarmed People Killed by Police

 

 

Number of Innocent Killed by Law Enforcement Annually, Solutions to School Shootings

 

The Real Facts About Gun-Related Crimes

 

Each year there are scores of deaths and injuries due to vehicle accidents.  Do we hold the auto accountable or the driver? Our society blames the driver so why do we blame the gun instead of the shooter?

*Dan Gross, head of the Brady Campaign used the number of daily gun murders as proof that "gun violence rates are not" going down. But the rate of gun murder is at its lowest point since at least 1981: 3.6 per 100,000 people in 2010. The high point was 7 in 1993. However, non-fatal gun injuries from assaults increased last year for the third straight year, and that rate is the highest since 2008.

*Federal data also show violent crimes committed with guns -- including murders, aggravated assaults and robberies -- have declined for three straight years.

Funny how armored cars ALWAYS and banks OFTEN have a non-public/police armed guard to protect fiat currencies...but schools NEVER have a private armed guard to protect something much more important to people (their own kids).

*Rep. Donna Edwards said that "since Columbine, there have been 181 of these school shootings." That's an inflated figure. She used a list of "major school shootings" supplied by the Brady Campaign that included incidents that were neither shootings nor at schools. By our count, the list shows 130 school shootings since Columbine that resulted in at least one student or school official being killed -- still unacceptably high, but a quarter fewer than claimed.

Here are some other facts. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world -- by far. And it has the highest rate of homicides among advanced countries. And yet, gun crime has been declining in the U.S. Firearm murders are down, as is overall gun violence -- even as gun ownership increases.

 

Justice Department Not So Good with Stats on Deaths Caused by Law Enforcement

 

Statistics are difficult to come by even though the Justice Department is supposed to keep track.  The average seems to be 300-400 annually and about 2000 in the past ten years.

 

Despite widespread public interest and a provision in the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the Attorney General to collect the data and publish an annual report on them, statistics on police shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be piecemeal products of spotty collection, and are dependent on the cooperation of local police departments. No comprehensive accounting for all of the nation's 17,000 police department exists.

 

The International Chiefs of Police, a police organization, tried in the 1980's to collect such information, but "the figures were very embarrassing to a lot of police departments," said James Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University who is a former New York City police lieutenant.

 

Estimated unwarranted deaths by law enforcement are 1-2% each year through guns, car chases, wrongful home entry, etc. Under the Police Accountability Act provisions of the 1994 Crime Control Act, the Justice Department is required to compile and publish regularly detailed national data on police use of force. Such data is not, however, available in any satisfactory form. That private organizations have undertaken to begin such a compilation is highly commendable.

The most revealing fact in the gun-control controversy is that among all of the criminologists who have ever changed their opinion on gun control, EVERY LAST ONE has moved from a position supporting gun control to the side skeptical of gun control and not the other way around... NOT EVEN ONE! Think about the significance of that one simple fact.

Don't think that just because the police are trained in the use of firearms that they are less likely to kill an innocent person. A University of Chicago Study revealed that in 1993 approximately 700,000 police killed 330 innocent individuals, while approximately 250,000,000 private citizens only killed 30 innocent people.

That still sounds high. So let's look at it in a different light. According to a study by Newsweek magazine, only 2% of civilian shootings involve an innocent person being shot (not killed). The error rate for police is 11%. What this means is that you are more than 5 times more likely to be accidentally shot by a policeman than by an armed citizen. But, when you consider that citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as do police every year, it means that, per capita, you are more than 11 times more likely to be accidentally shot by a policeman than by an armed citizen.

The Kleck study shows that police shoot and kill around 600 criminals each year. Yet the University of Chicago study shows that police killed 330 innocent individuals in 1993. That means that for every two criminals killed by police, one innocent citizen is killed by police.

Criminologists are the experts who study crime, criminals and their motivation. Their entire career centers around the collection and analysis of statistics surrounding crime and the tools of crime. These are the people who make it their business to know and understand how, when, where, why and by whom guns (or any weapon, for that matter) are used. And, like anyone in any job, they learn more as they grow in the job. So, if the evidence were there to support gun control, wouldn't you expect that at least a few Criminologists would have switched from opposing gun control to supporting it?

We have armed Air Marshals secretly flying on our planes, why not a similar program for schools? The DHS has plenty of cash to pay for it.

Guns are used for self-defense between 2.1 Million and 2.5 Million times every year. The following facts from the Kleck/Gertz study, relate directly to this fact.

• In the vast majority of those self-defense cases, the citizen will only brandish the gun or fire a warning shot.
• In less than 8% of those self-defense cases will the citizen will even wound his attacker.
• Over 1.9 million of those self-defense cases involve handguns.
• As many as 500,000 of those self-defense cases occur away from home.
• Almost 10% of those self-defense cases are women defending themselves against sexual assault or abuse.
• This means that guns are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of law-abiding citizens than to take a life.
• At an estimated 263 million US population, in 1995, when the study was released, it also means that an average of 1 out of every 105 to 125 people that you know will use a gun for self-defense every year.

Dr. Kleck also wrote in his book titled "Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Social Institutions and Social Change)" that burglars are more than three and a half times more likely to enter an occupied home in a gun control country than in the USA. Compare the 45% average rate of Great Britain, Canada and Netherlands with the 12.7% of the USA.

"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
-- Steven P. Halbrook
Attorney, author