President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
This is the sad reality. Gun violence is generally committed by sick people. Similarly, I saw this chart a few years back on Australian gun/knife violence. The plots are mirrored. Violence is sort of static.
That plot is in percentage. Of course violence is static. Because 100% of homicides are violent. Let’s see total number of homicides per year.
Edit: To clarify, if gun and non-knife homicides dropped to zero, and knife homicides dropped to one, that plot would show knife homicides skyrocket to 100%. The plot isn’t demonstrating the trend you think it is.
It’s much more likely to survive a stabbing than to survive a shooting.
“A new Johns Hopkins Medicine analysis of national trauma data shows that trauma patients were four times more likely to die from gunshot wounds and nearly nine times more likely to die from stab wounds before getting to a trauma center in 2014, compared with rates in 2007.”
That doesn’t mean what you think it means. You are not twice as likely to die form a stab wound, if you are treated quickly fort a stab wound you are much more likely to survive compared to a gunshot wound. You need to look at the incidence of death percentages:
“(Gunshot wound: early, 2.0% vs. late, 4.9%; Stab wound: early, 0.2% vs. late, 1.1%)”
So a stab wound if treated early has a 0.2% chance of death compared to a gunshot wound which has a 2% chance of death, meaning gunshots are 10 times as deadly. Under late treatment its 1% chance of death for stab wounds, and 4% for gunshots, so gunshots are 4 times as deadly.
Even late treated stab wounds are half as deadly as early treated gunshots. Gunshots are far more deadly than stabbings.
I don’t recall the origin of that or whether that’s the exact wording but the general idea at least has stuck with me.
If you run away from a guy with a knife, you have to outrun the knife-wielder. If you run away from a guy with a gun, you have to outrun the bullet.