There is a problem with the term “gun violence.” Not just the term itself, but the whole idea that firearm-related injuries and deaths are qualitatively different or special. Violence is violence regardless of the weapon or method used.

Gun violence is a handy bogeyman for gun control and other groups advancing similar agenda. By lumping homicides, suicides, and accidents together, gun grabbers of every stripe can use this family-sized phantasm to alarm the public. Even better, it can be used to make a variety of claims since the overwhelming percentage of Americans won’t check the underlying numbers.

Gun control addicts use this to confidently claim there is an “epidemic” of gun violence. In June 2024, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, declared “firearm” violence was a public health crisis. Murthy went on to recommend the adoption of the gun-grabbers’ wish list despite the fact that none of those measures have been shown to be effective based on results reported by the U.S. government.

When most people hear the word “violence” they associate it with one individual deliberately using force to harm another individual, i.e. assault or murder. It’s also the type of violence most alarming to the public. Supporters of 2A restrictions focus their rhetoric and “remedies” on exploiting this fear.

But there is a problem with this: Far from being a looming threat, the U.S. homicide rate has been declining.

FBI statistics for the 65 years from 1960 to 2024 prove this. The decade from 2010 to 2019 had a lower average murder rate than any comparable period going back to the last year of Eisenhower’s term. In fact, the 2010-2019 average was 12% lower than in the previous decade.

COVID-19 and widespread civil unrest in 2020 produced a sharp spike in the rate that peaked in 2021. However, the rate fell in 2022 and has continued to fall. The FBI’s estimated homicide rate for 2024 was 5.00 per 100,000, the same as the rate in 2019. In addition, the 2024 rate was 51% lower than the peak rate of 10.29 per 100,000 reported in 1980.

42^ There is a real public health crisis: Suicide. Before the red flag brigade gets too excited, this isn’t the bonanza you’ve dreamed about. The crisis is the 33% jump in the total U.S. suicide rate over the 20-year period from 2004 to 2023. Over that period, guns were used in about 52% of suicides. Put another way, during those years, an average of 21,484 people ended ther lives with a firearm each year; 20,191 used some other method. Twenty thousand people is a lot to ignore but that’s what the gun-grabbers do every year. They don’t even offer thoughts and prayers.

Over the two decades from 2004 to 2023, homicides and suicides accounted for 61% of firearm-related deaths and 37% of violent deaths. But that’s about where their propaganda value ends.

Homicide and suicide are fundamentally different acts. Even their primary impact is on different demographics: Males ages 15 to 34 have homicide victimization rates roughly twice those of the general population. However, focusing on firearm homicides, the rate for non-Hispanic White males is 20.42 per 100,000; the rate for non-Hispanic, urban Black males is 94.58 per 100,000, 4.6 times the White rate.

As mentioned earlier, suicides rose 33% in the 20 year from 2004 to 2023. Firearm suicides outpaced that growth, rising 42%. Even the group of states with red flag laws had a higher percentage of suicides carried out with firearms.

The key demographic in suicide is elderly White males, especially those aged 70-plus. They make up less than 5% of the population but the number of firearm suicides in this group is equal to about 10% of the total number of U.S. suicides in 2023, regardless of the method or mechanism used.

In homicide, one has to consider social pressures and other socioeconomic factors; firearm regulation; informal channels for weapon distribution and acquisition; bias in prosecution and the courts — and that’s the short list.

Suicides are always a matter of why; the how is mostly irrelevant. In 2023, the CDC listed 14 methods Americans used to end their lives. If the question of why isn’t addressed, there’s an abundance of choices to anwer the question of how.

These are each big problems but they don’t have a common solution. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, even if Gabby Giffords’ “Guns gone” fantasy came true.

The gun control zombies and Democrats wave their blow-up bogeymen and shed oceans of crocodile tears while shrieking “Gun Violence” and pushing the same old dog-eared, moth-eaten, simple-minded gun control laws they’ve been pushing for decades.

“Gun violence” isn’t about public safety or saving lives. If it was, they would be pushing a very different agenda and perhaps then their results wouldn’t be quite so abysmal.

As it is, we need to resist not only more vigorously, but more effectively. George Patton famously said: “Nobody ever successfully defended anything, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

[Note: All statistics sourced from publicly-available information released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Bureau of investigation.]

About Bill Cawthon

Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.