Gun Related Suicides

With the popular culture providing positive images of guns, the United States has a gun prevalence that is very rare in the modern world. While many people appreciate the “gun culture”, guns are heavily involved in violence in the United States. According to U.S. Department of Justice, since 1960, more than 750,000 Americans have died under firearms, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries. The figure 1 provides a comprehensive survey of U.S. violent crimes for the period from 1993 to 2011.This figure illustrates that from 1993 to 2011, about 60% to 70% of homicides were associated with a firearm. Over the same period, between 6% and 9% of all nonfatal violence, with about 20% to 30% of robberies and 22% to 32% of aggravated assaults involving a firearm.

More than two thirds of all homicides in the United States are gun related. Arizona is ranked the eleventh worst state. Nearly 36,000 people died in gun- related incidents in 2013. This is an increase of 13.8% in the past ten years. The CDC keeps track of all gun- related deaths for each state. Fatalities include homicide, suicide, and accidents. While gun laws are uniform across the United States, none of the states with the most gun violence require an individual to have a permit to buy rifles, shotguns, or handguns. The owners are not required to register their guns either in any of these states.

Statistics show that in 2015, there were 372 mass shootings, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870. Also in 2015, there were 64 school shootings, that number include incidents where a firearm was shot but no one was injured. There are roughly 300 million guns in the United States, which is about a third of the population. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Council on Foreign Affairs reported that "11,385 people died on average annually in firearm incidents in the U.S. between 2001 and 2011."

Imagine Black Friday shopping at the local mall knowing that people all around could be carrying loaded guns! Even though this may sound far fetched, under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, citizens have the right to possess and carry guns. Was this the intent of the Founding Fathers when they penned the Second Amendment? When written, the Second Amendment was about protecting the American government from both foreign and domestic threats (Truthout). Gun control is one of the hottest topics at water cooler discussions across America today. This topic is very polarizing. American citizens news feeds are flooded with stories about shootings on a daily basis, innocent victims being shot during a crime, senseless mass shoots, shots fired in self-defense, police shootings of criminals, and last but not least, the shooting that occurs in war. Americans are bombarded with reports and images of gun violence from television, the press, social media, and computer war games. Yet, how many people have actually held a gun? How many have

According to Jeffery Goldberg, guns are responsible for 30,000 deaths a year. This causes people who hear about crimes with guns involved to immediately think that the gun is the issue, but often guns are what saved the vi¬¬ctims life. Sharon Harris cited leading criminologist Gary

As stated before mass shootings have increased drastically throughout the decades. Just within 2017, the number of mass shootings are 293 with several deaths and injuries, (“Gun Violence Archive”). Within the last 10 years, the deadliest mass shootings have occurred in America history, (CNN). Recently in Las Vegas, Nevada held a music festival for people to enjoy and listen to music, but a shooting changed the evening for many. A man was in an hotel near the event and shot down towards the people and killed a total of 58 people and injured at least 200, (CNN). The Orlando shooting was right behind it with a total of 49 dead, (CNN). Since this has become a part of our everyday lives, we rarely hear about all the mass shootings that kill not even into the double digits.

C. Thesis Statement (position on topic – preview main ideas – outline of speech); A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer, and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer.The Centers for Disease Control listed firearms as the #12 cause of all deaths between 1999 and 2013, representing 1.3% of total deaths. They were also the #1 method of death by homicide (66.6% of all homicides) and by suicide (52.2% of all suicides).

In the United States alone, over thirty-one thousand people die annually as a root to firearms. The American Medical Journal concluded, “there is a positive correlation between guns per capita and firearm relate deaths” (AMJ 2). This means that when more guns are in circulation, more deaths will occur:

According to the 2010 study there were 31,672 fatalities due to firearms. The following year the number went up to 32,163. Homicides that are a result from guns are relatively high in the States and they take more than eleven thousand lives a year. According to Vision for Humanity, an initiative for the Economics and Peace, the United States is ranked 99 out of 162 countries in the 2013 global peace index, homicide rates and violent crimes are among the various criteria used to determine the ranking (Vision of Humanity). Mass shootings at work places, schools, shopping malls and places of worship are happening in an alarming frequency. While the Newtown shooting is one of the horrific ones, it certainly isn’t the only one that happened in the last two years alone. There were several other mass shootings that took the lives of many all across America. While there are other significant problems in America that need our attention, in my opinion, increasing rate of Gun violence is the most significant problem in American that needs to be addressed.

From January 1, 2015 to December 23 of that same year a total of 12,942 people had been killed in America due to gun violence. These numbers include murders, accidental shootings, and murder suicides. According to a nonprofit website that records gun deaths in America called “Gun Violence Archive”, there were more than 50,000 gun violence incidents in 2015 alone. This includes homicides, gang incidents, and accidental and self-defense shootings, but it does not, however, include the near 20,000 American deaths due to gun suicides that occur each year.

Mass shootings are a huge epidemic in the United States right now. Many people live in fear of another mass shooting. Two important facts to know about mass shootings is what exactly a mass shooting is and how often they occur. CNN’s authors used the Gun Violence Archive to define a mass shooting in his article “A Visual Guide; Mass Shootings in America” as “any incident where four or more people are wounded or killed”(Willingham). The frequency of mass shootings depends on which source you look at; using the definition given by CNN as well statistics, the United States has seen “136 mass shootings in the first 164 days of this year”(Willingham). However, author Sam Harris has a staggeringly different statistic in his blog article “The Riddle of the Gun”. Harris claims that “seventy mass shootings have occurred in the U.S. since 1982, leaving 543 dead” (Harris). Harris’s article is three years older than CNN’s article, yet the facts are staggeringly different by an amount that is nearly impossible to reach in three years. The definitions the two articles used for defining mass shootings are obviously different, but are both capable of informing the reader on the statistics of mass shootings frequency.

About 12,000 people are killed by firearms a year in the united states. 62% of firearm deaths are suicide. on an average day somewhere around 88 people are killed. There are a lot of surveys that compare state gun laws to state gun deaths, however they do not tell you everything. Gun deaths includes suicides, police shootings, and defence shootings not just murders. From 2009 to 2013

According to the Violence Policy Center, there were only 211 justifiable firearm homicides in the U.S. during 2013. In that same year, there were 7838 criminal gun homicides. That means that for every justifiable gun homicide, there were roughly 37 criminal homicides committed with a firearm. Even having a gun can make a situation more fatal. An American Journal of Public Health study found that a person with a gun on them during an altercation with a firearm was 4.46 times more likely to get shot than those who did not. Guns ultimately do more harm than good in most

I have conducted a very broad analysis of every mass shooting between January 2009 and July 2015 that was distinguishable through FBI data and media reports. This report illustrates the 130 mass shootings, nearly two a month, that occurred over 35 states. Each account includes the area of the shooting, number of people killed, and/or injured, and data on the shooter, guns, and ammunition.

When this is compared to the rates of accidental deaths caused by something other than guns, it doesn't even come close. Accidental gun deaths ranked under every other category (motor vehicles, falls, poisoning by solids or liquids, drowning, fires and burns, and suffocation by swallowing an object) except for one; poisoning by gases or vapors. The closest accidental death to guns was suffocation by swallowing an object, which was still over twice the rate of guns at 3,300 deaths. (National Safety Council).