44% of Americans Know Someone Killed by Gun Headline (seriously?)

[CountryGent]

Agreed that this stat is pretty useless. How many people does one come in contact with over the course of a lifetime? A lot. Off the top of my head, I can think of a friend who took his own life, I knew a kid who died in a hunting accident (decades ago, as in Reagan's first term), and a guy I worked with in the 1990s who was hit by a bullet in Vietnam. I'd wager a lot of people, if they thought about it, could come up with at least one example.

Tangentially, I went to school with a murderer. We were good friends in Middle School, but ran with different crowds in High School. In early adulthood, he shot, and killed, two people in cold blood just for the "thrill" of it. The last I heard he and his accomplice (whom I never met) are still rotting in prison where they belong. Kind of creepy to think about, though we hadn't been in contact for years before the incident.

 

[ParkerBoy]

I'm nearly 70 years old, I've never lived in a city larger than 15,000 people and for OVER half my life I've lived in the country. I'm surprised that the number is a LOW as 44%. I'm going to list all of the people I know who have been "shot" either intentionally or not. From least serious to fatal.

1. I've been "shot" several times while bird hunting, by shot raining down on me from other hunters AND by my own shot, that came down on me when I shot into serious winds. Maybe not what they were looking for, but I believe it qualifies as being "shot".

2. I "shot" my brother in law on a pheasant hunting trip. Again a high wind situation, where the shot was blown over 100 yards down wind from where it would have landed if there had been no wind. One #6 shot hit him in the ear lobe and drew a "tiny' amount of blood. And left a red mark something like a mosquito bite. He still laughs about it.

Now for the more serious stuff.

3. Years ago, a fellow I knew and worked with was horribly disfigured by a shotgun blast that took part of his face off. It was an accidental discharge when he dropped a shotgun when he was younger.

4. Back in the early 70's when I was in college, my Dad was shot in an attempted hold up of the liquor store that he ran for a small town. A slight wound in the leg. He was a 22 year veteran of the Army, with service from 1935 until 1958 and never came close to any kind of injury. It made him a local celebrity for quite some time.

5. Also in the mid 70's, the father of a very good friend committed suicide. My friend had moved away after college and I used to stop by and visit with his parents on a regular basis. I took it particularily hard, because I had though about stopping by the evening he did it, and I though that if I had, maybe he wouldn't have done it.

6. My cousin's 8 year old son, was hit and killed by a stray bullet while walking on a rural dirt road in South Central Minnesota. None of the other kids he was with heard a shot. It was chalked up to an accidental shot from some distance away and never solved. Again early 1970's.

7. Just over a year ago, a client of mine committed suicide. It was highly thought out, because of the way it was staged and prepared for by him. He was a retired MN. Highway Patrol Officer.

I have the feeling that I knew a couple more suicides, but I just can't recall specifics. But you can see, from my experiences, that I'm surprised that 44% number is as low as it is.


I do recall another suicide of someone I "knew", or at least I had met ONCE. I was probably 15-16 at the time and hunting with a group on my Uncle's farm in Northern Minn. and we were getting ready to make a drive. On the opposite side of the road, the neighboring farmer was part of a group making a drive on that side of the road. He was struggling with his firearm(Ruger .44 Mag carbine) which was what I was shooting. He couldn't get a round chambered and I showed him how to do it. Never met him again. Some years later he killed himself with THAT gun. My "take away" at the time was.....What kind of idiot goes hunting with a gun he doesn't know how to use! Obviously he'd never shot the gun. I probably wouldn't have recalled it, if it hadn't been for that incident.

 

[John Brown]

As a teen, a guy I knew intentionally shot himself in the calf with a .22 because he didn't think it would hurt. It did.

 

[ArgentineSteel]

I have had guns pointed at me, but luckily no personal experience with someone who was killed or shot. I can think of 2 that are once removed from my immediate circle who were killed.
That said, where did they take the survey? Chicago high schools would report near 100%. Most deployed military units would have reported higher rates.

 

[Hop Sing]

I used to know a guy who murdered someone with a gun and had a buddy that was shot while hunting.

 

[CLT65]

I expect that if the question was asked in Japan the statistic would be very, very small.

On the other hand if you asked about knowing anyone personally who committed suicide, in Japan, the percentage would be extremely high.

All that these kind of surveys do is try to make well-known national statistics feel "personal", presumably to help people "feel" the need to "do something" about guns.

The average liberal reading all our personal stories in this thread would be aghast at how we've all seen so much death and suffering at the barrel of a gun, yet we stubbornly refuse to accept the need for gun control.

My take, and that of most of us I think, is different. From our collective stories I see three issues:

1) Suicide- a mental health issue irrelevant to guns (see Japan)

2) Gun accidents- tragic and wrong; something does need to be done. Guess what, something is being done. The NRA safety education program has proven very successful, and not at government mandate. I think we'd all agree that a stronger safety culture is a very good thing.

3) Violent crime (what they call "gun crime")- a violent culture is going to be violent, with or without gun control. It's a cultural issue not a gun issue.

Sorry for going on, just thought I'd say my piece. I know I'm preaching to the choir.

 

[MrMillspecer]

I bet 100% know someone injured buy an intoxicated or distracted driver.

90% of men have had a one night stand with a crazy woman.

 

[teflon6string]

So many variables to factor in.

Starting with the polar extremes: For every American who believes they don't even know anyone with a gun, there is at least one other (or maybe a few) who'd run out of fingers and toes counting friends who got popped within just a few blocks of home. How many kids over recent decades went to big inner city high schools?

There's also the semantic argument of actually knowing someone who's been shot vs. knowing of someone who's been shot. Or knowing someone who knows someone. Perhaps someone you went to school with in 1970 or worked with at some point in your past. Maybe a massive tragedy in the news. Or just a dipshjt like Kurt Cobain?

And finally...

Politician: "Hey, what's the definitive numerical answer to ___?"

Paid Statistician: "What do you want it to be?"

 

[CLT65]

90% of men have had a one night stand with a crazy woman.

So basically you're saying that 90% of men have had a one night stand?

 

[3MTA3]

My father was shot in WW2 and my brother was shot in Vietnam. so I'd have to answer yes. Both survived, but I bet the author of that survey would tell you they would have been safer if they didn't have guns.

 

[P7M13]

I think the statistic is meaningless without context and metrics about the sample pool.
You can ask a dumb question and throw out useless data, or you can ask a series of if-then questions and get useful data that can be mined for relevant purposes. The media just wants sound bites. Facebook just wants you to see a headless chicken running around.

Asking questions also has a larger margin of error because the sample may answer dishonestly.

Pollster : "Do you know of someone who is shot?"
Attention seeking Chicken Little, who likes being in the drama club : "Why yes, I do!"​

Questions that I find more interesting:

1. By your own stupidity, have you attempted to join the Darwin Club, and if so, how many times?
2. Have you ever considered killing someone? How? [gun / knife / poisoning / auto / fire / hired killer / ...]
3. Have you or your family ever been threatened to the point that you considered killing the aggressor?

In pondering the question, I realized how many people I knew had been shot, so I limited it to close friends and their immediate family (no friends of those friends), and people I dealt with frequently on a business basis. 4 murdered, 3 committed suicide, 2 survivors shot during robberies, and 2 shot and killed by police. What I did witness in all those is the waste, senseless loss and intense sorrow that violence causes. In every one of those cases, discussion never once encroached "restrict gun owership", because we all knew, literally, that if you removed guns, only the criminals would have them. Made as much sense as playing in traffic.

I bet 100% know someone injured buy an intoxicated or distracted driver.
90% of men have had a one night stand with a crazy woman.

And... 100% of that 90% have questionable sanity.