Trego's Mountain Ear

Sometimes the information that the Center for Disease Control holds is very easy to understand.  This is one of those times – if you can find and click on

QuickStats: Age-Adjusted Rates of Firearm-Related Homicide, by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2021 | MMWR the first thing you come to is this graph:

While it didn’t surprise me, it did shock me.  That tall column that represents Black American deaths – which should include about an eighth of our population – is five times the national average, and probably on the order of 15 times the rate for white Americans.  As I listen to liberals wanting to outright ban assault weapons, I realize that statistics show us where the problem is. 

This website Notes from the Field: Firearm Homicide Rates, by Race and Ethnicity — United States, 2019–2022 | MMWR provides the data, so we have more to look at than the graph:

Race and ethnicity*	Rate†
	2019	2020	2021	2022
A/PI, NH	1.0 (202)	1.0 (208)	1.2 (241)	1.1 (233)
AI/AN, NH	6.4 (154)	7.9 (191)	7.7 (185)	9.3 (224)
Black or African American, NH	20.5 (8,438)	28.3 (11,832)	30.4 (12,721)	27.5 (11,565)
White, NH	1.6 (3,129)	2.0 (3,969)	2.1 (4,064)	2.0 (3,828)
Hispanic or Latino, any race	3.8 (2,301)	4.8 (2,947)	5.5 (3,455)	5.5 (3,500)
Overall§	4.4 (14,414)	5.8 (19,384)	6.3 (20,958)	5.9 (19,637)

Go ahead – pick your own year and see how uncommon it is for a white American to die from firearms violence.  It looks to me like a Black American is about 14 times as likely to be murdered by someone with a firearm.  That bothers me – mostly because the names and faces of my students come to the blackboard of my mind as I look at the vastly higher probability of being murdered.

I think of a nutty white kid, with 2 parents who are mental health specialists, climbing onto a roof to shoot Donald Trump’s ear – and how much we’ve heard about that event.  We’re not hearing how much worse firearms homicides are in America’s Black community.

PEW research, at What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. | Pew Research Center offers more data – and when four times as many Black Americans are murdered by firearms users than whites, I think the data can be used to figure out a way to do something effective.

PEW shows that nationally suicides by gun outnumber homicides by gun:

This kind of explains the difference – all of the studies I have read, from Durkheim on, show white males as the most likely to suicide (though some of our Native tribes show even higher rates. 

Toward the end of the article, PEW reports:

“In 2020, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 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 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”

Maybe, just maybe, we could figure out where we need more safety training?