from John Bloomberg School of Public health
Question: Mass shootings, like the incident at Virginia Tech, are rare. However, we hear reports of murders and of shootings in the United States every day. How serious an issue is gun violence in the United States?
Answer: In 2004, there were 29,569 gun-related deaths in the United States, including almost 12,000 homicides, more than 16,750 suicides and approximately 650 unintentional deaths. This adds up to about 80 gun-related deaths in the United States every day—or almost 2.5 times of the number of persons killed at Virginia Tech each day.
There were also approximately 70,000 non-fatal gun shot injuries in 2005 serious enough to require at least an emergency room visit. In addition, there were 477,040 victims of gun-related crimes in the United States in 2005.
Question: How does the United States compare to other countries in terms of gun violence?
Answer: The violent crime rate in the United States is about average when compared with most other high-income, developed countries. But our murder rate is much higher than most. The difference is that the violent crime we have in the United States is more likely to be fatal than in most other high-income countries—a difference primarily attributable to the greater use of firearms in violent crime.
