# More guns, more murders **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 23, 2006, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-guns-more-murders/365743 "2006-07-23T20:46:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 118
**Author:** ![UncleBeer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/977dab/32.png) [@UncleBeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBeer)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2006, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-guns-more-murders/365743/118 "2006-07-27T22:47:50Z")
> [@](#): > > I never said anything about the number of guns in circulation, you did. Not directly, no. But you offered declining production figures as a rebuttal to my claim that the number of guns in circulation has taken a large jump. Production figures which are for gun manufactured only in the United States. We also import a shitload of guns from places such as Brazil, Canada, Italy and even Japan. Anyway, we can use your figures of firearm production to make a reasonable guess at the increase in the gun supply. Since firearms have a useful lifecycle of about 100 years, we know that nearly all of them manufactured in the last 40+ years and not exported are now in circulation. The only guns not still in circulation would be the ones recovered by cops, ones exported illegally, and the ones voluntarily turned into the cops through things like buy-back programs. Then, to that number, we gotta add all the imported ones. Your ATF figures for 2004 show 3.1 million guns manufactured in the United States. Of those, only about 141,000 were exported, leaving slightly fewer than 3 million U.S. made guns here. Add on an unknown, but large number of imported guns and we’re well over 3 million - probably approaching four. With an estimated 250 million+ guns in the United States, we find that even in a year of _declining_ production, the supply has increased by more than 1.2%. Add that up over 40 years, and you get about 50% more guns. A vast increase. And that’s without even really counting the imports. Other folks have other, even higher, estimates. In 1970 there were about 155 handguns per 1000 persons. In 1998, there were 340/1000. The figure has more than doubled even as the population climbed. Gary Kleck claimed in his 1997 book _Targeting Guns_ using a variety of sources, that the handgun supply had tripled in the last 40 years. > [@](#): > > I noted that you didn’t deny the NRA’s claim of the ‘assault on gun owner rights’. If, as you stated, the number of guns have actually increased, while gun deaths have declined - that’d be pretty damn good evidence that the gun control laws have been saving lives. What? I don’t follow you. I thought you said more guns necessarily resulted in more murders. > [@](#): > > The data on the unintentional firearms death for US kids under the age of 15 (the overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children aged less than 15 years was nearly 12 times higher than among children in the other 25 countries combined) is from a February 7, 1997 report from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This contradicts your previous claim. That even while the gun supply has increased, there are fewer gunshot deaths. And I’m kinda curious about the CDC data; I don’t thing the CDC collects that kind of information about countries outside the United States. And from what year, or years, was that 12x figure calculated? And may I suggest this site for pulling stats? [http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/default.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/default.htm) It yields only 235 unintentional gunshot deaths in the United States of kids under the age of 15 in 2004, out of a population of 60.7 million. This is a mere .39 deaths per 100,000. If that’s 12x higher than 25 other nations combined (and which 25 nations might those be is another good question to be asked), then we find that there are only .0325 deaths per 100,000 for those other nations. Makes me wonder what the actual quantity was and how precise that number might be. Can’t calculate that without a population figure, though. > [@](#): > > The Journal of Trauma study in question is Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home, from Kellermann, among others. Bad-mouth him all you want, I can pull up any number of critiques of your John Lott and Gary Kleck. Fortunately, I don’t need Kleck, or Lott, or anyone else to discredit Kellerman’s work. That guy **always** includes criminals known to each other in his studies when calculating the number of people killed by their “friends or relatives.” He also includes deaths which happen _during the commission of other crimes_. He, himself, admits to using such constructs in order to artifically increase the numbers of deaths he can count. Kellerman is also known for using non-random samples. And some very limited data sets which, by many, aren’t believed to be large, or diverse, enough to extract valid statistics from. The guy’s a hack. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-guns-more-murders/365743)._