A statistic for the Day of the Dead
Remember the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut last December?
Since then, Slate magazine has been collecting news reports of gun deaths in the US. Here’s a map.
Actually, that’s a map of just the 1000 locations with the most deaths.
As of today, they have 10,001 deaths with the place and the name of victim known. That’s going to be an underestimate, since some don’t make the news. And since the number doesn’t include suicides, who make up about 60% of gun deaths in the US according to the CDC. These mostly aren’t mass shootings, so they don’t attract international attention, but there are about as many gun deaths as car deaths in the US.
It’s not simply a matter of number of guns: the US has about 3.5 times the number of guns per capita as New Zealand, but about seven times the gun death rate per capita (nearly ten times the rate if you don’t include suicides). It may be more that for a lot of people in the US, an important reason to own a gun is so that you would be able shoot another person with it if the circumstances arose. In a recent survey by Pew Research, 48% of gun owners gave self-protection as their main reason for owning a gun, and 79% said owning a gun made them feel safer. I can’t find figures for NZ, but I’d expect hunting and target shooting to be more common reasons here.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »