School Shooting at Oxford High School

[jcole]

Here's the part you forgot to include: from the Austin Statesman.

The FBI’s numbers also show that of all the homicides reported, 13,663 were committed with firearms of any kind, or about 77%. Only about 4% of homicides overall were from hands, fists and feet.And 4,863 of those gun homicides were committed with firearms of a "type not stated," meaning law enforcement agencies didn't specify in their data reporting which type of gun was used. Enough rifles could be among those to push that total higher than personal weapons — even 5% would do it — though there’s no way to know for certain.

The FBI’s data is based on voluntary reporting. Not every law enforcement agency files an expanded homicide report. These statistics are based on reports from 15,875 of 18,623 law agencies, meaning the number of homicides is likely higher. The Centers for Disease Control, for instance, lists 19,384 gun homicides in the U.S. in 2020, based on U.S. death certificate information provided by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The FBI statistics show that handguns were used in most of the gun homicides, with 8,029. That’s likely because "violent crime is typically higher in urban areas than rural ones, and handguns are better suited for urban living," said Adam Lankford, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Alabama.
Lankford and a colleague did a study in 2020 that found that semiautomatic rifles or assault weapons are increasingly being used in mass shootings.
"It makes sense that handguns would be used more often than long guns in muggings, gang violence, robberies, or any other form of violence where the perpetrator may try to hide his firearm before and after the crime," Lankford said. "Public mass shooters are less concerned about hiding their firearms because they typically don't expect to escape."
AR-15 or AR-15-style rifles have been used in many high-profile mass shootings, including at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, a concert in Las Vegas in 2017 and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Such weapons were also used in the two most recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.

And in fact more people die from being hit with hands and feet than are killed with all types of rifles combined.


The numbers were posted somewhere just last week, and the annual deaths from hands and feet were 668 or so, and the total murders by all types of rifles combined was something like 445.

[Rocket]

Here's the part you forgot to include: from the Austin Statesman.

Aah. I hadn't read the article, I'd just seen a headline somewhere stating the two numbers.

If child deaths from rifles IS as high as 700, that's not good.

But perspective IS important too, and 250 children are killed and another 140,000 suffer head injuries from riding bicycles without helmets. Lots more suffer injuries even with helmets.

And for sure children riding bicycles is less important than the country being free from tyranny. At least I think so. I've never lived in tyranny, but it sounds really bad.