Overall, about 30%, if you include homicides, suicides and Dick Cheney’s hunting pal. (Roughly 30K deaths/year from guns; 75K non-fatal gunshot wounds.
If you are shooting yourself on purpose, the success rate of killing yourself is probably in excess of 98%, based on my experience. A few failures where you flinch and only blow off part of your face, or get only the frontal lobe with a small caliber…
If you got shot by someone else who was shooting to harm, you’ll die about 10-15% of the time (10+K homicides/yr; 75-ish K non-fatal GSWs. But I suppose part of that depends on the skill of the shooter and the circumstance.
War? Depends on how far back you go, I suppose, as modern weaponry has improved.
Be careful with those figures. That will be 30K *reported *deaths/year from guns; 75K *reported *non-fatal gunshot wounds. Remember, it’s a lot easier to hide a minor gunshot wound than it is to hide a dead body. Where criminals or the poor are involved, reported gunshot wounds will skew very, very heavily towards the most serious injuries. Minor injuries that will heal without paying for a doctor or major injuries that heal satisfactorily under treatment from a back-alley surgeon will never, ever be reported. As a result, the wounds that are reported will be a tiny fraction of the total wounds received, and inevitably the wounds most likely to kill.
It’s impossible to find reliable figures for the actual number of non-fatal gunshot wounds but I’ve seen suggestions from reliable sources that it is ten times the reported rate.
One way to estimate this is to look at statistics for people killed versus people wounded. For example, looking at war casualty rates (Wikipedia, US Military), the historic rough average is that if X people were wounded in a war, then overall approximately 50% - 70% of X died in that war (by eyeball analysis of the data). This is a very rough estimate, and this data includes death / injury due to other causes besides gunfire like artillery, bombs, and maybe diseases.
But it’s another place to start to answer this question.
I’d think that THE most important variable is either what body part actually got hit, or what body part was being aimed at. I’d imagine that survival rates are pretty good when the foot got hit, even with the most dangerous gun, and that survival rates are pretty bad when the head got hit, even with the least dangerous gun.
First problem, around 85% of fatalties in modern war are the result of explosives, but they only have about a 10% fatality:wound ratio. In contrast bullet wounds account for about 10% of fatalaties, but have about a 30% fatality:wound ratio. looking at overall wartime injury rates to determine the lethality of bullets is worse than useless.
Second problem is that you are assuming that every injured in war gets injured just once, so that if we have 10, 000 injuries and 5,000 deaths we can say the death: injury ratio is 50%. But that’s completely invalid because people who get wounded tend to get wounded multiple times, whereas it is exceedingly rare for a person to suffer more than one fatal wound. For all we know, there could have been 6, 000 people injured on average 1.3 times and 5, 000 of those died in a later action. In that case the chances of dying in war would be >75% but the chance of dying from any individual wound would still e 30%.
But of course these are just combat figures. Compare the ~3, 000 US casualties in wars in the past 10 years to the ~10, 000 firearm homicides each *year *during the same period. As noted above, finding reliable figures criminal firearm injuries is effectively impossible, and since they completely swamp military deaths there’s no real way of knowing what the actual odds of dying from a gunshot are.
Presumably the OP eliminates any interest in the fact most shooters miss their target entirely? The vast majority of bullets never hit flesh.
However if you are only considering bullets that find their target, to what extent do you make a distinction between a single bullet fatality and a fatality after being hit multiple times?
There’s also the issue of what constitutes a shooting-related death. Okay, if I get shot and fall down dead, that’s being shot to death.
But suppose I get shot in the leg and the wound gets infected and I die a week later. Did the shooting kill me or did I die from an infection? Suppose I get shot and paralyzed and five years later, a truck runs me over when I’m trying to cross a busy street in my wheelchair. My death was directly due to my being shot but was it a shooting-related death?
That was discussed in great detail a few years ago when a gunman opened fire at a city council meeting in Kirkwood, MO. Four people died that night; the mayor survived gravely injured for seven months. His death was ruled a result of the aftereffects of the shooting, therefore gun-related.
Charles Guiteau tried this argument at his trial. He said he had just shot President Garfield and it was his doctors who killed him. Which is probably factually correct - if Garfield hadn’t received what passed as medical treatment back in 1881 he most likely would have survived.
Although Guiteau seems to have missed the point that shooting somebody still counts as a murder attempt even if you don’t succeed. He’d have been better off going for an insanity defense.
I know several people who have been hit by shotgun shot, and none of them even know Dick Chenery. So there may be some large number of non-serious injuries that maybe shouldn’t count here. Perhaps the question is better limited to people who have been shot at with the intention of killing them, or at least a reasonable expectation that their lives would be endangered.
Based on a career of taking care of the newly shot, I find your reliable sources hilariously over-stated. I suspect you or your sources have been watching too many movies.
It’s not that big of a deal to get your gunshot wound checked out in the emergency department with some cockamamie story about how it happened to minimize “consequences.”
There are not a lot of tough thugs running around who nursed their gunshot wounds themselves as “just a flesh wound.” Most of 'em don’t even like a needle for anesthesia, and there is something about a bullet wound in your anatomy the specifics for which you forgot to attend class that brings you in for reassurance.
By law GSWs seen by the health system are reported as such, but there isn’t some huge fear of consequence that prevents their owners from getting them checked out.
