Op-Ed: Guns Still Safer than Cars, and Most Everything Else

It is indeed too bad that cars and guns are not treated the same way. If they were, accidental automobile deaths might become nearly non-existent.

In a recent editorial (“Guns, cars and dead Americans”, 10/24/2013) the Post-Gazette bemoaned many things, and opined with a level of inaccuracy not tolerated at shooting ranges. The editorial’s gist was that government regulation and legislation made roadways, air, water and consumer products safer, so similar regiments should be applied to guns and for the same effect.

But guns accidentally killed just 606 people in the U.S. in the most recent reporting year. That’s about 1/55th the number of people killed in traffic accidents.

Despite gun ownership steadily increasing over the past three decades, and with more than eleven million people obtaining permits to carry guns in public, accidental firearm mayhem has fallen to a rate so low as to approach statistically irrelevant noise levels. It has always been so, but interestingly the already low accidental firearm death rate is falling faster than that for cars, dropping 33% in the last decade compared to only 25% for autos.

Digging beneath the surface is important to all policy making, but it is especially critical in the myth polluted realm of gun control. Even the Post’s own editorial accidentally discharged one common misstatement, that “Guns now kill about 30,000 Americans annually.” Though that many people do die annually from gunshots, over 19,000 of them were suicides. When more than 60% of deaths are mental health related, the suicide tool of choice becomes irrelevant. Canada shares many cultural elements with the United States, has a nearly identical suicide rate, but a lower gun ownership rate. The World Health Organization notes that severely depressed Canadians opt to use poison to kill themselves.

Proposing solutions requires understanding the problem. From health and criminological statistics we know that of all gun deaths about 61% are suicides, 2% are accidents, another 1% are legal interventions, and the other 36% are criminal actions – intentional homicides. The overwhelming majority of homicides are gangland slayings, as Pittsburgh’s own East Hills Bloods and Fulton Block Boyz will attest. Ponder this for a minute. If gangs and people of mental fragility were dealt with, 97% of all gun deaths would disappear. Obviously this isn’t a gun control problem. Drugs and gangs aren’t an NRA problem. Mental instability isn’t a consumer protection, reckless gun owner, or even a child-proofing problem (only 62 children were accidentally killed with guns in 2010, and some of those deaths are of a suspicious nature).

Therein lays the rub with the Post’s editorial. Ralph Nader’s book “Unsafe at Any Speed” may have led to reductions in automobile deaths, but cars operated on public highways are rightfully regulated by the public. Air and water are shared natural resources, and likewise are the public’s concern. A man who keeps a revolver in a night stand, or a woman target shooting with her AR-15, are not. Criminals, especially the well-known repeat violent offenders are within the regulatory reach of law, though Pittsburgh appears to be failing on that front.

Click here to read the entire op-ed at CalGunLaws.com.