There have been a number of opinions expressed, including by our City Council President Karen “Rudy” Renaud, about the correlations of race and gender with gun violence, so it might be useful to look at some actual data. Two good sources are the FBI and the Gun Violence Archives, a non-partisan clearinghouse for gun violence data. I invite everyone to check out their information for themselves. Since the Gun Violence Archives includes the actual incident reports, even a quick perusal reveals who is shooting whom. It’s very different from what is reported in most national media. I’ll only give some conclusions drawn from those data.
Your chances of dying by gun are low. You have a much better chance of dying from the flu (National Safety Council). If you do die from a bullet, it’s most likely that you fired it yourself, either accidentally or intentionally. If someone else shot you, they probably knew you, and, often, you lived with them at some point. “Mass shootings” are rare and primarily motivated by family or gang disputes. In a population of over 300 million, being shot by someone you don’t know is so rare that it makes national news.
If you are shot by someone else, you most likely were shot by someone of your own race. If not, you stand a slightly better chance of being shot by someone of a race other than yours if you are white. Men are doing most of the shooting, and they are mostly killing men. Most gun deaths are men killing themselves, and most of those are straight, white men. White women are especially unlikely to shoot anyone. Guns are the murder weapon of choice for men. Women kill in more diverse ways. Women are more likely than men to poison their family members (Washington Post), smother them when the victim is incapacitated, or resort to the occasional “run them down with the car” or shove them out the window (technically, “defenestration”). When women do kill, or commit other crimes, they are, on average, less severely punished (Bureau of Justice), a seldom-mentioned gender disparity.
Guns are often used by civilians for self-defense. Although the rate of gun use for self-defense is vastly higher than for the much-publicized “mass shootings,” it’s lower than the rate of accidental discharges, so you have a slightly better chance of accidentally shooting yourself than of fending off an attacker, while being shot by a stranger is the least likely of all. You’re more likely to have a police officer take a shot at you than you are to shoot your gun in self-defense. If you’re shot by the police, you are probably a man, but, as shown in a recent study from the University of Michigan, there isn’t a racial bias in police shootings. As that study determined, if you want to avoid being shot by the police, avoid high-crime areas. Police tend to shoot white people in areas where white people are committing crimes, and they shoot black people where black people are committing the crimes. The race of the police officer doing the shooting doesn’t affect the likelihood of shooting, or who gets shot. Still, it needs to be remembered that the number of people being shot by law enforcement is far lower than the number of civilians shooting each other, and those people are overwhelmingly shooting people they know, who look like them and live in their communities.
Given the statistics, it’s strange that our City Council president should express personal concerns about guns. Being a white woman living in a low-crime area, there is very little chance of Ms. Renaud ever being the victim of gun violence. So why would she express a fear of straight white men with guns? It’s especially odd since it was mostly white men with guns who made Greenfield such a safe city in the first place, and it’s mostly white men with guns who tirelessly work each day to keep Ms. Renaud safe from every sort of violence. It seems there is a need for some apologies here, and certainly an opportunity to learn a bit more.
As always, thoughtful comments are welcome at henrycarlyle@outlook.com.
John Blasiak is a resident of Greenfield.