More
Americans killed by guns since 1968 than in all U.S. wars, columnist Nicholas
Kristof writes
By
Louis Jacobson on Thursday, August 27th, 2015 at
4:13 p.m.
In
a column published shortly after the on-air
slayings of two TV journalists in southwestern Virginia, the New York Times’
Nicholas Kristof offered some "data points" about the pervasiveness
of gun violence in the United States.
One
of them was: "More Americans have died from guns in the United States
since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history."
That
sounded familiar. Really familiar. As it turns out, the web version of
Kristof’s column sourced a PolitiFact article from Jan. 18, 2013, that
fact-checked commentator Mark Shields’ claim that since 1968, "more
Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country's
history." (Shields used the year 1968 because it was the year presidential
candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by gunman Sirhan Sirhan.)
We
rated the claim True.
Two
and a half years later, we wondered whether the statistic still held up, so we
took a new look at the data.
Deaths
from warfare
We
found a comprehensive study of war-related deaths
published by the Congressional Research Service on Feb. 26, 2010,
and we supplemented that with data for up-to-date deaths in Iraq and
Afghanistan using the website icasualties.org. Where possible, we’ve used the
broadest definition of "death" — that is, all war-related deaths, not
just those that occurred in combat.
The
one change we’ve made since our initial fact-check is to revise upward the
number of Civil War deaths. As several readers pointed out after we published
our earlier fact-check, the CRS report cited 525,000 Union and Confederate
dead, but a subsequent study revised that estimate upward to 750,000.
The study’s author acknowledged a great deal of uncertainty about the proper
figure, and some experts later questioned whether it’s wise to include so
many deaths from disease — perhaps two-thirds of the 750,000 figure — since
disease in an era of relatively primitive medicine was so widespread that it’s
unclear what share of fatal disease during that period was really a result of
the war.
Still,
we’ll err on the side of the higher estimate and use the 750,000 figure this
time.
Here’s
a summary of deaths by major conflict:
War
|
Deaths
|
Revolutionary
War
|
4,435
|
War
of 1812
|
2,260
|
Mexican
War
|
13,283
|
Civil
War (Union and Confederate, estimate)
|
750,000
|
Spanish-American
War
|
2,446
|
World
War I
|
116,516
|
World
War II
|
405,399
|
Korean
War
|
36,574
|
Vietnam
War
|
58,220
|
Persian
Gulf War
|
383
|
Afghanistan
War
|
2,363
|
Iraq
War
|
4,492
|
Other
wars (includes Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti)
|
362
|
TOTAL
|
1,396,733
|
Gunfire
deaths
As
we did in our previous fact-check, we used a conservative estimate of data from
a 1994 paper published by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to count gun-related deaths from 1968 to 1980. For 1981
through 2013, we used annual data sets from CDC. Finally, for 2014 and the
first eight months of 2015, we estimated that the number of gun-related deaths
were equal to the rate during the previous three full years for which we have
data — 2011 to 2013.
Here
is a summary. The figures below refer to total deaths caused by firearms:
Years
|
Firearm-related
deaths
|
377,000
|
|
620,525
|
|
464,033
|
|
2014
(estimated
based on rate from 2011-2013)
|
33,183
|
2015
(estimated
based on rate from 2011-2013)
|
22,122
|
TOTAL,
1968-2015
|
1,516,863
|
So
the statistic still holds up: There have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths
since 1968, compared to 1,396,733 cumulative war deaths since the American
Revolution. That’s 120,130 more gun deaths than war deaths -- about 9 percent
more, or nearly four typical years worth of gun deaths. And that’s using the
most generous scholarly estimate of Civil War deaths, the biggest component of
American war deaths.
We’ll
offer some added thoughts for context.
These
figures refer to all gunfire-related deaths, not just homicides. In fact,
homicides represent a minority of gun deaths, with suicides comprising the
biggest share. In 2013, according to CDC data, 63 percent of gun-related deaths
were from suicides, 33 percent were from homicides, and roughly 1 percent each
were from accidents, legal interventions and undetermined causes.
There’s
a risk in using a statistic like this to decry mass homicides carried out with
guns. Using total firearm-related deaths makes the case against guns more
dramatic than just using homicides alone.
However,
in our view, Kristof framed this comparison with care. He mentioned suicides
not once but three times in his column, and he referred broadly to the
"unrelenting toll of gun violence," not specifically to the toll of
gun homicides. Indeed, at one point, Kristof specifically referenced the impact
that stricter gun laws can have on gun suicides, writing that in 1996, after a
mass shooting in Australia, lawmakers tightened gun laws. "The firearm
suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the
firearm homicide rate was almost halved," according to data published in
the Journal of Public Health Policy, Kristof wrote.
Finally,
we’ll note that Kristof’s wording differed ever so slightly from the claim by
Shields that we checked previously. While Shields said that "more
Americans have died from gunfire," Kristof wrote that "more
Americans have died from guns." Some may argue that guns don’t kill
people, people do. However, that’s a philosophical judgment and beyond our
ability to fact-check. Here, we’ll stick to the numbers, and we find they’re on
Kristof’s side.
Our
ruling
Kristof
wrote, "More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968
than on battlefields of all the wars in American history."
Even
using a significantly higher estimate for Civil War deaths than we did the last
time we fact-checked this claim, the comparison still holds up. The number of
gun deaths since 1968 — including, as Kristof was careful to note, both
homicides and suicides — was higher than war fatalities by roughly 120,000
deaths, or almost four years’ worth of gun deaths in the United States. We rate
the claim True.
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