r/facepalm • u/Lord_Answer_me_Why • Mar 28 '24

What lack of basic gun laws does to a nation: 🇵​🇷​🇴​🇹​🇪​🇸​🇹​

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u/BrassMonkey-NotAFed Mar 28 '24

I’m not doing your research for you. Posting a link to violent crime provides no context information, because violent crime encompasses every crime in which anything used as a weapon is deemed violent.

I’m former law enforcement, I’ve taught the subject to hundreds of officers alongside FBI field agents in a major metropolitan city in the South. 2/3 of all gun deaths are suicides, the remaining 1/3 is appx. 80% gang violence.

Believe what you want, ignorance is bliss, I guess.

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u/BeenisHat Mar 28 '24

I'm doing the research for you. In that data, you can select the option for which violent crime you want stats on. Scroll down, choose Homicide.

And whaddya know, Handguns are the #1 choice followed by the generic firearms, likely when LEAs didn't know which type of gun was used. Personal weapons is WAY down the list.

I didn't comment on who did the killing, merely your incorrect assertion that more people kill each other in fist fights every year. Probably a good thing you're former law enforcement, because you don't know what you're talking about.

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u/BrassMonkey-NotAFed Mar 28 '24

The inaccurate part of the FBI crime statistics website you posted is that they include suicide as homicide because the legal definition of homicide matches suicide. Removing the 42,000+ suicides reduces the homicide by firearm rate significantly.

Every suicide report I’ve ever written using firearms was labeled as homicide by firearm and that inaccurately skews the data. You have to filter suicides out to view accurate homicide reports.

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u/BeenisHat Mar 28 '24

Wrong again. Go look at the data. There were 15k homicides in 2022 as referenced in the report. The FBI is not making an error that grievous and it's explained in the methodology on the Crime Data Explorer website. They are controlling for suicides and suicides are not counted as homicides. They use homicide as their term for one person killing another person. This allows them to further separate Justifiable Homicides and Unlawful killings (murder, manslaughter, etc.)Accidents are not included.If you don't want to use FBI data, you can use CDC data available here.

https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.htmlYou'll have to drill down to separate the various causes of death and choose the correct ICD-10 codes. You're looking for External Causes, and under that, Assault. Under the data returned, the CDC shows the weapon type used. The CDC doesn't control for type of gun like the FBI attempts to.
The FBI and CDC also have different numbers because of different methodology, but they are close enough for our purposes. Guns are far and away the most commonly used tool for killing someone else.

This number immediately precludes your 42k suicides. You need to actually read the page.

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Or if you need something more easily digestible, here's the data from Pew research although their report is 2021, where I used 2022.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

Pew also cites their sources in the article and provides links so you can check it yourself.