New Slate / @GunDeaths Tally Report of Gun Deaths Since Sandy Hook Includes People Killed by Cops, Suicide and Accidental Shooting

by Scott Creighton

and still the Slate gun violence tally shows gun violence down 65% compared to 2010

So is Slate suggesting we take guns from cops as well?

In order to make their gun death tally as dramatic as possible, the folks over at Slate and @Gundeaths (I wonder if there is any Bloomberg money behind that group) included people killed by police officers in their new study of how many people have died by “gun violence’ since the Sandy Hook shooting. A total of 99 people are on that list produced by Slate who were killed by police officers. Actually, it would be more than that since the list of police killings that I used for this article comes from another that is only up to date through March 12th of this year.

They also have included suicides and accidents as well apparently. Their list includes Kent Calhoun of Co. who died 3/26/2013 by shooting himself in the chest and Daniel Jonhston who was killed by cops on 3/12/2013  Tyshaun McClurge was fatally shot by accident on the 23rd of this month. He is also included in the Slate list.

They’ve included everything they can think of that is gun related in order to make a large number that can “shock” the people into supporting gun control laws.

But what they don’t expect you to notice is the fact  that according to these numbers, gun violence is way down in the U.S. over this period of time.

You can go to WISQARS Inquiry tabulator from the Center for Disease Control and get the officials numbers from the last year they tabulated them, 2010. What you find is a marked decrease in gun related deaths over this period that the Slate study is done.

The Slate study concluded that between Dec. 14th 2012 and March 28th, there have been 3099 gun related deaths. That’s a total of 105 days or 28.76% of a year.

So if you go to the WISQARS site and you look up the number of gun related deaths for the year of 2010 and just look up the violence related qualifier, that’s “homicide, suicide, and legal intervention (cop shooting)” and leave off accidental shooting, the number it reports, the official number for 2010 is 30,814.

Now, do the math on that. Compare the past 105 days of gun related violence as reported by Slate of 3,099 to 28.76% of that number from 2010 (and remember, we don’t even include accidental deaths in that search number) and you get 8,862.10.

That is a HUGE drop-off in gun related deaths. That’s a 65% improvement from just two years ago. And again remember that we didn’t even factor in accidental deaths in our 2010 numbers while they are included in the Slate study.

Also consider, since around 1920, the ratio of gun deaths by suicide verses murder have been pretty steady. This article explains that to be about a 3 of 5 ratio.

“In 2010, the last year for which complete numbers are available, the number of gun deaths by suicide in the United States outnumbered homicides 19,392 to 11,078. If you add up all American gun deaths that year, including accidents, 3 out of 5 people who died from gunshot wounds took their own lives. Those figures are not an anomaly: With just a few exceptions, the majority of gun deaths in the United States have been self-inflicted every year since at least 1920.” Boston Globe

So you can extrapolate this way: at 99 of that 3,099 were cops killing someone. That leaves 3,000. So if the 3 of 5 number still works, and I have shown that they include suicides in their report, then that means that only 1,200 or so have been killed by gun violence who didn’t either do it to themselves or have cops do it for them.

1,200 VICTIMS of gun violence. The category they hope you equate to their 3,099 number. And that still doesn’t include tabulation for accidental deaths which they have put in there as well.

Just for the record, according to that government website, the number of people killed in the United States by “terrorism” was “0″.

This study is pure propaganda. If any police commissioner could come out and display improvement like these numbers show he would be demanding a raise and a statue of him in front of City Hall. In this case, they wish to use these numbers to strip away our 2nd amendment rights.

It just goes to show my professor was right back in my college days: you can do anything with stats as long as no one looks that close.

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