It's easy to think that in the wake of Las Vegas and other episodes like it that the country is rife with firearm-facilitated murders. It's also easy to draw the conclusion, listening to some precincts of the nation's media, that the bulk of these homicides are committed by white men. The statistics, however, don't bear out either of these assumptions.
The website FiveThirtyEight has an article which explains what the state of affairs concerning gun deaths actually is in the United States. I encourage you to read the article which is accompanied by an interesting interactive graphic.
Here's a summary:
The media tend to focus on terrorism, mass shootings, police officers killed in the line of duty, and police shootings of civilians, but these are a relatively small fraction of the 33,000 deaths.
Mass shootings are rare. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds of the more than 33,000 gun deaths that take place in the U.S. every year are suicides, 85% of whom are male and, of these, half are men over 45.
Homicides account for about a third of all gun deaths (about 12,000) per year. Half of homicide victims are young men and two thirds of them (roughly 4000) are black, most of whom are murdered by other young black men with guns that they possess illegally.
Accidents and domestic violence, though another relatively small fraction of total gun deaths, make up the balance.
It would seem from numbers like these that if we're serious about addressing gun deaths we need to focus primarily on the epidemic of hopelessness that causes people to take their own lives and on the epidemic of gang violence that plagues our urban centers.
Everything else, as important as it is, simply leaves the heart of the problem untouched.
