In the wake of our mass shooting of the week Wednesday in California, I'm not going to pen a pointless column about gun control that will never take place.
I've come to the sobering realization there will never again be a time in American history when a madman can't gain easy access to a machine gun and slaughter innocent people.
That being said, I've stumbled on a few gun-related statistics I'm going to convey. The first pertains to my opening statement about a mass shooting of the week. Actually, there's nearly a mass shooting every day in the U.S.
According to ShootingTracker.com, there were 1,064 days between Jan. 1, 2013 and Nov. 30, 2015. In those 1,064 days, there were 1,050 mass shootings in this country, with "mass shooting" being defined as an event where four or more people are shot.
So Wednesday's rampage where at least 14 people were killed is really no big deal. There's a 98.7 percent chance at least four people will be shot at an event today.
With 310 million guns in circulation, or roughly one gun for every American, is there anything that can be done to reduce gun deaths? Probably not.
Studies focusing on developed countries and gun deaths have continually reached this obvious conclusion. Countries with more guns have more gun deaths. Wow, I wonder how many manhours were spent on this glaring bit of insight?
Since no act of Congress is ever going to reduce the number of guns in this country, it stands to reason we're always going to have an enormous number of gun deaths. But here's a noteworthy statistic, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
People with guns are more likely to kill themselves than to kill others. The CDC analyzed stats dating back to 1981 and at no time during that span did homicides outnumber suicides.
In 2013, the last year data is available, about 21,000 people used a gun to kill themselves. That same year, a gun was used to kill others about 12,000 times. There were also around 900 "accidental" gun deaths in 2013.
Taking that information one step further, the fatality rate for all suicide attempts is around 9 percent. However, if a firearm is used, the fatality rate for suicide attempts soars to 85 percent.
For all the folks who think a "good guy" with a gun is their best source of protection against a "bad guy," a National Crime Victimization Survey analyzed some 14,000 incidents involving a perpetrator and a victim. Of all those incidents, a gun was brandished in self-defense 127 times. The study found producing the gun did not reduce the chance the victim would receive bodily injury, however it did reduce the chance of property loss.
The victimization survey also determined that owning a gun increases the chances your home will be burglarized, likely indicating the reason for the burglary in the first place was to steal the gun.
What I gain from all this information is gun ownership does not equate to greater safety. Your gun is more likely to harm you than to protect you.
Standard editor James Clark can be reached at 473-2191.