There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Sure, statistics are reflective of reality, but I've seen way too many people use them to paint a false picture, usually by leaving out some kind of context or blatantly misrepresenting exactly what we're seeing.
For example, let's take the studies that claim guns are the number one killer of children. That's the claim, and the numbers are what they are. They just count 18- and 19-year-old adults as "children" to beef up the claim. That just happens to also be the same age demographic that's far more likely to be engaged in criminal gang activity, conveniently.
You get the picture.
Well, now we have this report claiming that suicides by firearm are at an all-time high for the third straight year.
Gun-related suicides in the U.S. reached record highs in 2023, even as gun homicides continued to decline from their pandemic-era peak, according to a new report from the Center for Gun Violence Solutions and the Center for Suicide Prevention, both based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The new report, Gun Violence in the United States 2023: Examining the Gun Suicide Epidemic, finds that guns were involved in 46,728 deaths in the U.S. in 2023—or one death every 11 minutes. For the third straight year, gun suicides reached a new high: 27,300, or 58% of all gun deaths, were suicides. And more than half of all suicides in 2023 involved a gun. The report is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2023, the most recent year for which finalized data is available.
The report notes that suicides accounted for the majority of all firearm deaths every year since 1995.
Now, we knew that suicides account for the majority of "gun deaths." In fact, gun rights advocates routinely point this out when the "gun death" hysterics start, and it's correctly noted that suicide is a mental health issue, not a gun issue.
But this claim is interesting, but mostly because of what's presented here. Can you tell what I'm talking about?
That's right, they're talking whole numbers and not per capita rates. See, the United States population increased every year. Comparing the suicide rate today with 20 years ago is going to produce more in total numbers simply because there are so many more people than then.
I checked the Johns Hopkins report, too. There are no suicide rate comparisons presented. They keep talking about the suicide rate and gun death rate, but they never present any historical data to back up their claims. So, they seem to just be using the raw total to reach this determination.
And that's an issue, because I know they're misrepresenting a lot, because this same report continues:
Total gun homicides in 2023 (17,927) fell nearly 9% from 2022 (19,651). However, gun homicides remained near-record levels in 2023, the fifth-highest total on record.
Let's look at this from Pew Research for a moment.
While it kind of supports the claim that so-called gun suicide rates are near record highs--which, again, are a mental health issue versus a gun issue--it's pretty clear that the gun homicide rate is nowhere near any record levels or close to the fifth highest anything.
In fact, it looks like most of the 70s and the first half of the 90s all had higher "gun homicide" rates.
As for that gun suicide rate, though, Johns Hopkins claims the last three years are records. They're not, as Pew illustrates with a higher rate in the 1970s.
So yeah, they're lying here. They're using raw numbers to make the problem look worse rather than the rate, which might not alarm people nearly enough.
While you have lies, damn lies, and statistics, this one manages to kind of be all three at the same time.
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