From 2000 through 2007, inclusively, approximately 780 thousand people in the United States took a bullet. Most of them were wounded by another person in an act of violence. A fairly large number were wounded by accident, killed by a bad guy, or killed themselves. A small number died in a shooting accident, tried to kill themselves but messed up, or were wounded or shot by a cop. Here’s the data culled form the CDC databases on injuries and deaths in the US, in crude rate per 100,000:

Continue reading Accidental v. Intentional, Fatal v. Non-Fatal, Gunshots, 2000-2007 in the USA →

Because you wanted to know:

First observation: Far more men are killed in this manner than women. Boys with their toys. Presumably, women are being killed by something else. Second observation: There may be a trend towards decreasing rates of death by accident involving firearms. This could be a simple increase in the effectiveness of medial intervention, or perhaps it is something else.

Since this came up I thought you might like to see the data.

NOTES: It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatal to non fatal over long time spans (before/during/after transition to high quality trauma treatment in the US); I would like to see good data breaking down suicide by age that tracks along with the CDC surveys; Most importantly would be information of similar quality and sources indicating attempted suicide and successful suicide with means other than guns. From the numbers we do have, we can say that there is a bias towards minors in the suicide category, and non-gun attempts are successful less than half the time but gun-attempts are successful a large percentage of the time (which you can see on this table); What is key the current discussion is the nearly 24,000 people shot in this sample year by a gun by accident; The phrase “shot by cop” is probably an oversimplification.

Yet the 11-year old girl lies in a coma, the bullet removed from her brain on Friday, with a poor prognosis.
Continue reading “We’ve grown up around firearms. We know the safety and we practice it.” →

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