Armed and Safe

CDC Non-Sense

Dr. Mark L. Rosenberg, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control spoke to doctors and hospital staff members in San Diego on June 14 1994. He said that violence among young men in the United States is a raging epidemic. The murder rate of 15- to 24-year-olds has increased by 41% over the past decade, and nearly all the increase is due to firearms deaths. Dr. Rosenberg said about two-thirds of all homicides are committed with guns. Using CDC figures, this would indicate that there were about 24,000 total homicides in the United States last year.
The CDC, parent organization to the NCIPC, says there were 37,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 1990, including about 19,000 suicides, 16,000 homicides and 1,400 unintentional shootings. Dr. Rosenberg said guns kept in the home are much more often used against family members than against criminals.
Using Dr. Rosenberg's own numbers, let's see what he thinks he means. If there are approximately 2.5 million times per year when a gun is used to defend against criminals and we assume that Dr. Rosenberg's statement of "much more often" means guns are used twice as often against family as against criminals., simple arithmetic calculates that 5 million people had a household gun used against them (by another family member, by themselves or by an intruder) last year. Now, if we accept the federal number of 960,000 firearm-related crimes in the United States last year, the remaining 4.54 million times guns were used against family members must not have been crimes.

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