What are more common: premeditated gun deaths (some guy actually plans the shooting some time in advance), or spur of the moment gun deaths (including non-premeditated murders, accidents, and kids getting into their parents’ gun cabinets)?
(I suspect it’s the latter, as it’s a larger category, but I’d like to be sure of my facts before I go around using them in debates).
Guns suck.
It’s quite likely that non-premeditated shootings are the majority, but I rather doubt that there’s any way to prove it. The closest thing I’ve found comes from the FBI–
In addition, some murders are committed during the commission of other crimes, such as robberies, and certainly some of those would be because of panic, etc.
Lukeinva, you know better than that if you’ve been here three years. This is GQ, not the pit.
Suicides generally make up over half of all gun deaths.
Accidents have been dropping for a long time and are only a small percentage. Accidental poisonings are vastly more common.
Wiki.answers.com says;
“According to the CDC in 2006, Last up to date numbers, 30,896 total, of which, 642 accidental, 16,883 were Suicide, 12,791 were Homicide, 220 were Undetermined and 360 by Legal intervention. Remember that in the same year, 43,664 were killed in Motor vehicle accidents, 37,286 died from poisoning, 20,823 died from unintention falls. In 2005 CDC reported 652,091 people died from heart disease, 559,312 from cancer and 143,579 from stroke.”
So that’s 54.6% Suicide, 41.4% Murder, 2.1% Accidental, 1.2% by Law Enforcement.
And you were still 18 times more likely to be killed by Cancer. 43.7 times more likely to die of Cancer than Murder.
Here is one of the first papers to show that guns kept in the home are many times more likely to be used for violent deaths (i.e. accidents, homicide, suicide) than for self-protection. Only one in two hundred of the deaths due to guns kept in the home was attributable to an intruder being shot.
The study has been criticized (but this is not GD ;))
Guns kill people like flies make garbage /bumper sticker]. Hammers and hands kill, too.
A firearm is a tool. It does it’s job at the discretion of the holder. If you shoot someone without justification, you suck. The gun was just following orders.
The failure of the study is in the reporting, and what is being compared.
As I have often said on this board, when I lived in North Minneapolis, I displayed (never pointed, never fired) my handgun FIVE TIMES (in 11 years) to prevent someone from breaking into my house while I was there - and they KNEW I was there. In addition, I displayed a firearm in a remote wayside rest in Idaho at 6:30am on a Sunday morning to prevent two young men from mugging me. Again, displayed, did not point or fire. None of these incidents was ever officially reported and would not turn up in any study.
So that whole idea, and the tack that self-defense is not a legitimate reason to own a handgun, really don’t get too far with me, because I have fairly significant experience that shows otherwise.
Without ever having so much as pointed it at anyone let alone shot them.
Now when you look at the numbers, they’re impressive. But they have to be kept in context to the number of people in this country (we’re closing in on 320 million) and the number of other deaths. I would wholeheartedly agree that we have far too many shootings and murders (including by other methods). Unfortunately, this is our culture, and it is unlikely to change anytime soon. We have a large number of different subcultures in this nation, including a lot of violent ones. A very large number of those murders are members of violent subcultures killing each other. I would be very interested in seeing what percentage of the total murders fall into that category, but at the moment, I haven’t the time to research it.
Now since this is QG and not GD or the pit, I will leave off debating how we might reduce these numbers or the entire issue of Gun Control, which is already being discussed in other threads elsewhere.
The statistic you are looking for would not be revealing without taking into account the two principle venues of homicide. There is one type in which an ordinary citizen takes it upon himself to kill somebody. The other is the type in which a person who is already involved in criminal or underworld activity finds that a homicide or two will help him remedy some of his day to day problems.
So your statistical analysis would have to subdivide homicides into at least those two categories. I am assuming that the OP is talking about the first type only, and not concerned with gangland assassinations, which themselves might account for a majority of gun-related homicides.
Since gun control is gun control, the latter would be at least somewhat relevant. I think.
“Gun control” would in effect be a “War on Guns”, and I would not expect it to play out much differently than the War on Drugs. It would just raise the price of the commodity and force it into an expanding criminal underworld where "the latter"would become statistically larger.
The former, to which I referred, is the inclination of ordinary law-abiding people to to commit homicides. The latter is an incidence of gun homicides that would be a natural byproduct of your gun control.
The distinctly different characteristics of the motives would place the two into different statistical categories.
Scare off the intruder, or make him fear intruding in the first place, and what do the statistics show? Nobody is shooting intruders! The majority of gun deaths are murders!
Guns work best when they aren’t used at all. So using gun death statistics in a gun control argument is misguided. The trick is to see if crime frequency or severity (as well as accident frequency or severity) goes down or up in a population with widespread gun ownership. Which is tough to measure, since there’s no lab and no control population.
And if it turns out that crime goes down and accidents go up with increased gun ownership, is the trade off worth it or not? That’s an ethical question which has nothing to do with statistics. Not to mention the larger ethical question regarding the trade off between freedom and safety.
My point is not to debate, but to show that this is a complex topic with many facets, and pulling out a few crime or death statistics to support your side is unlikely to convince anyone.
And you’ve been here for ten, so you should known what junior modding is 
Your post?
Hence the smiley. Difference between you and me: I have self awareness.
I remember reading that suicide by gun is the leading statistic for gun fatalities in the U.S., so based upon the OP’s criteria of premeditation, suicide is not accidental. Looks like that would win. Homocides by gun were second. Accidental fatalities by gun were a fraction of the previous two.
[Moderator Notes]
Lukeinva, this post is completely worthless with regard to the OP, and not appropriate for GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
amanset, you should also know insulting other posters is not permitted for GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
[Moderator Instructions]
Everyone else: let’s not turn this into yet another thread debating gun control. Please stay a close as possible to the questions asked in the OP. If this becomes a debate, I’ll close it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
what convinces people is common sense:
guns are death machines. that is their sole purpose.
guns make killing easy. press a button, pull a lever and everything in a distant path is destroyed, intended or not.
guns have no natural inhibition threshold proportional to their destructive impact and ease of use. genetically raised threshold, personal physical risk is eliminated by destruction at a distance , etc dont exist
in any danger, “deaths” are only 2% of the total serious injuries. autos, war, guns, etc.
debates about “i displayed my gun to a potential intruder and he did not intrude” are a logical fallacy. similar to “i prayed and he did not intrude”? its the logical fallacy : “Correlation does not imply causation”