An updated report from the Pew Research Center once again affirms what the firearms community has known for many years: of all homicides involving firearms, only 4 percent involved rifles of any kind—including “guns sometimes referred to as ‘assault weapons’—which tends to refute arguments such guns should be banned.
The Pew report, published earlier this month, is an update of a report originally published in August 2019. It contains updated data, including the revelation that 79 percent of homicides in 2023—the most recent year for which FBI crime data is available—involved firearms. There were 22,830 slayings that year, of which 17,927 involved firearms. Handguns were involved in 53 percent of those crimes, Pew says.
In addition to the low percentage of slayings involving rifles of any kind, the Pew report also says shotguns were used in only one percent of murders in 2023.
This raises a question for those supporting a ban on so-called “assault rifles.” Why?
According to Pew Associate Director John Gramlich, who authored the updated report, “handguns were involved in 53% of the 13,529 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as ‘assault weapons’ – were involved in 4% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (42%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as ‘type not stated.’”
This actually reveals something about the way the FBI now assembles its data, and how local police agencies report their data. The agency adopted a new format in 2020, shifting from the user-friendly Uniform Crime Report to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and its Crime Data Explorer (CDE), which isn’t so friendly.
According to Pew, the number of gun-related deaths in 2023 was the third-highest total on record (46,278). Of those deaths, 58 percent were suicides (27,300), while 604 involved law enforcement and 463 were listed as accidents, based on data from the CDC. Another 434 gun deaths resulted from “undetermined circumstances.”
Another revelation in the updated Pew report was that, “The places with the highest gun murder rates in 2023 included the District of Columbia (28.5 per 100,000 people), Mississippi (17.6), Louisiana (17.2), Alabama (13.2) and New Mexico (11.1).
“Those with the lowest gun murder rates,” Pew said, “included Hawaii (1.5), Utah (1.8), Nebraska (1.8), Idaho (1.8) and Massachusetts (1.8). Rate estimates are not available for New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.”
One of the more important discussions in the Pew report was about mass shootings. The report could not specifically list the number of mass shootings which occurred during 2023. Instead, the report said, “Definitions can vary depending on factors including the number of victims and the circumstances of the shooting.”
But more to the point of disagreement on the numbers is the differences based on who does the counting.
“The FBI collects data on ‘active shooter incidents,’ which it defines as ‘one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area,’” Pew said. “Using the FBI’s definition, 105 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2023.
“The Gun Violence Archive,” Pew continued, “an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 722 people died in these incidents in 2023.
“Regardless of the definition being used,” Pew observed, “fatalities in mass shooting incidents in the U.S. are a small fraction of all gun murders nationwide each year.”
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