Do We Understand Gun Violence?

All of a sudden, for reasons that nobody has yet to figure out, the number of fatal and non-fatal injuries caused by guns seems to be going down. Maybe it’s just because gun violence was so frequent during the PanAll demic that we are simply looking at a return to the ‘normal’ rate of gun violence which is still way out of control. Or maybe there really is the beginning of a trend that will make this country less violent for reasons that we still don’t know.

But either way, I am still not convinced that for all the concern about this problem over the past thirty-odd years, that we have any grasp on what gun violence really means at all.

What we do know is that there is an enormous difference between gun violence rates when such numbers are computed on a racial basis, in particular the difference in gun violence rates of whites versus blacks.

But before I look at the numbers, we need to first define gun violence, okay?

According to the World Health Organization, violence is the conscious attempt to injure yourself or someone else. Pick up a gun and use it to injure yourself or someone else and you have gun violence, okay?

Given those definitions, we can compute gun violence rates for homicide and suicide, numbers which are published annually by the CDC. The CDC counts victims of violence, not perpetrators of violence, the latter numbers are usually computed in reports issued by the FBI. But the FBI doesn’t track suicides, since suicides aren’t crimes. On the other hand, numerous studies have found that homicide is the one, person-to-person crime which is almost invariably committed by persons of a particular race against other people of the same race.

So, when we look at homicide rates on a racial basis, even though the CDC only gives us numbers for victims, we can use those numbers to make a valid comparison of perpetrators of homicide on a racial basis as well.

Ready? Here goes.

In 2023, the homicide rate for whites was 3.86 (per hundred thousand,) for blacks it was 26.56, more than seven times the white rate.

How do these numbers stack up against homicide rates in other nation-states? Canada — 2.73, Germany — 0.91, Israel — 1.62, New Zealand — 1.11, Sweden — 1.14.

So, we experience more homicidal violence than any other OECD nation-state, but considering the fact that there are probably some 300 million guns sitting in the homes of whites in the United States, the white population in this country should be considered fairly law-abiding and non-violent compared to homicidal violence in the black community where for reasons of racism and social history, legal gun ownership effectively doesn’t exist.

On the other hand, don’t forget that homicides are a lesser form of violence than suicides, which in 2024 claimed 49,316 lives.

Again, guns were a favored way to exercise this type of violence, with guns being used in 55% of the successful attempts made by people who decided to end their own lives.

But here, the white — black comparison of this type of violence changes from homicidal violence in a dramatic way because the overall white suicide rate was 15.77 versus the black suicide rate which was 8.80.

How do we explain this remarkable difference in white — black suicide rates when the factors which are always mentioned that create a suicidal impulse (financial stress, family break up, job loss) are so much more prevalent in black communities than in communities whose racial makeup is white?

We can’t explain this difference in racial behavior because it has never been studied by any of the public health researchers who tell us again and again about the violent nature of black-

American life.

What the data on gun violence really illustrates is that blacks like to use guns to kill each other, whites like to use guns to kill themselves.

Which is why I believe that for all the talk about gun violence, we still don’t understand it at all.