A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 3

The previous post mentioned that the gun law debate in the US, since it's such an emotional issue, tends to stir up plenty of misconceptions as well. I'll briefly address two of them here.

First, people often tend to think that guns are commonly held throughout the US. This is not as true as you might think. Ownership of firearms in the US seems to follow a power law distribution (although maybe not a very strong one). A very small minority owns a lot of guns and a lot of households maybe have a rifle or nothing at all. This is how you arrive at a situation where there as many guns as there are people in the US, but where just over a third of households actually report having one.

Chart via Ezra Klein's Wonkblog.

I also mentioned earlier that the rate of homicides in the US due to firearms is declining. While this remains true, my fault was in not looking at the causes for why it was falling. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of people wounded by guns jumped up by nearly 50 percent from 2010 to 2011, but improving medical technology has made massive strides in keeping people alive.

This, again, follows common sense. As the number of guns in the US has increased, so has the number of people getting injured by guns. The same can be said for cars, tricycles or any other ridiculous instrument we use to harm ourselves all the time.

But the fact that gun violence is not declining makes me reconsider my original position. If the rates of people getting shot and surviving is climbing that quickly, maybe people really will want to actually change gun laws. There's a good question about how much change is needed to actually make a difference, but it seems like it might be enough to spur people out of apathy.