Before you start on me, I get it. The term “gun violence” is a load of BS that’s meant to demonize guns versus the people who use them either illegally or irresponsibly, if not both.
I didn’t make it up, though, and the purpose of words is to communicate ideas. If I use the term–and I try to put it in quotes or lead with “so-called” for a reason–it’s because you mostly know what it means.
But a lot of people don’t. Not really.
They know the broad strokes just fine. They know it’s violence committed with a gun. The problem is that a lot of stuff is considered violence that most people wouldn’t think of in quite that light.
And then there’s more, such as how lumping everything together makes no sense when you break things down.
Luckily, Bill Cawthon wrote a piece for the Buckeye Firearm Association that does a pretty good job of spelling it all out.
There is a problem with the term “gun violence.” Not just the term itself, but the whole idea that firearm-related injuries and deaths are qualitatively different or special. Violence is violence regardless of the weapon or method used.
Gun violence is a handy bogeyman for gun control and other groups advancing similar agenda. By lumping homicides, suicides, and accidents together, gun grabbers of every stripe can use this family-sized phantasm to alarm the public. Even better, it can be used to make a variety of claims since the overwhelming percentage of Americans won’t check the underlying numbers.
Gun control addicts use this to confidently claim there is an “epidemic” of gun violence. In June 2024, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, declared “firearm” violence was a public health crisis. Murthy went on to recommend the adoption of the gun-grabbers’ wish list despite the fact that none of those measures have been shown to be effective based on results reported by the U.S. government.
When most people hear the word “violence” they associate it with one individual deliberately using force to harm another individual, i.e. assault or murder. It’s also the type of violence most alarming to the public. Supporters of 2A restrictions focus their rhetoric and “remedies” on exploiting this fear.
But there is a problem with this: Far from being a looming threat, the U.S. homicide rate has been declining.
We’ve talked a lot about that lately, because it’s been big news. Even The Trace couldn’t hide the fact that it’s dropping, as is the number of “mass shootings” as the Gun Violence Archive defines them, which aren’t really mass shootings as most people think of them.
Sure, that homicide rate is still high compared to other developed nations, but our non-gun homicide rate is higher than their total homicide rates, which includes those with a firearm, so I don’t think it’s a valid comparison.
However, Cawthon gets into a side of so-called gun violence that’s figured into the “gun deaths” statistic that is, in fact, an epidemic.
There is a real public health crisis: Suicide. Before the red flag brigade gets too excited, this isn’t the bonanza you’ve dreamed about. The crisis is the 33% jump in the total U.S. suicide rate over the 20-year period from 2004 to 2023. Over that period, guns were used in about 52% of suicides. Put another way, during those years, an average of 21,484 people ended ther lives with a firearm each year; 20,191 used some other method. Twenty thousand people is a lot to ignore but that’s what the gun-grabbers do every year. They don’t even offer thoughts and prayers.
Over the two decades from 2004 to 2023, homicides and suicides accounted for 61% of firearm-related deaths and 37% of violent deaths. But that’s about where their propaganda value ends.
Homicide and suicide are fundamentally different acts. Even their primary impact is on different demographics: Males ages 15 to 34 have homicide victimization rates roughly twice those of the general population. However, focusing on firearm homicides, the rate for non-Hispanic White males is 20.42 per 100,000; the rate for non-Hispanic, urban Black males is 94.58 per 100,000, 4.6 times the White rate.
…
The key demographic in suicide is elderly White males, especially those aged 70-plus. They make up less than 5% of the population but the number of firearm suicides in this group is equal to about 10% of the total number of U.S. suicides in 2023, regardless of the method or mechanism used.
Exactly. The only similarity is the weapon used.
Aside from the demographic differences, the truth is that if someone wants to kill, either themselves or someone else, there are plenty of other ways to do it. Anti-gunners, when talking about suicides with a firearm, argue that a firearm is the most effective way to take one’s own life, which is true. However, there are other methods almost as effective that aren’t going to be covered by any gun control law, but might be prevented if we actually took mental health seriously in this country.
We bounce between stigmatizing mental illness and people using mental illnesses as a substitute for a personality, and far too few are getting the actual help they need. Then, should they take their own life with a firearm that they’ve had for years, that’s treated as more of an excuse to pass gun control.
Which, for us here at Bearing Arms, is particularly disgusting. I never worked with Bob Owens, but I resent the hell out of people trying to use this death to undo his life’s work.
But at the end of the day, it’s just more convenient for anti-gunners to lump all of these people into one group, call it all “gun violence,” knowing that most people will make subconscious associations that revolve around one person shooting another, and then try to leverage that into political action.
That’s what will happen, and their buddies in the media will latch onto that and run with it, never informing the general public of the breakdown except when trying to use suicides to justify gun control. Then, they forget about it when the next “gun violence” story drops.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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