Stats

This was posted as an answer to a newspaper article calling for more gun control. Unfortunetlysources for the data were not identified.

“The firearm accident death rate has decreased 94 percent since the all-time high in 1904. The annual number of such accidents has decreased 80 percent since 1930, while the U.S. population has more than doubled and the number of firearms has quintupled. Among children, such accidents have decreased 90% since 1975. Today, the odds are more than a million to one, against a child in the U.S. dying in a firearm accident.”


“Firearms are involved in 0.5% of accidental deaths nationally, compared to motor vehicles (37%), poisoning (22%), falls (17%), suffocation (5%), drowning (2.9%), fires (2.5%), medical mistakes (1.7%), environmental factors (1.3%), and pedal cycles (0.7%). Among children: motor vehicles (41%), suffocation (21%), drowning (15%), fires (8%), pedal cycles (2%), poisoning (2%), falls (1.9%), environmental factors (1.5%), firearms (1.1%) and medical mistakes (1%).”

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The firearm accident death rate has decreased 94 percent since the all-time high in 1904. The annual number of such accidents has decreased 80 percent since 1930, while the U.S. population has more than doubled and the number of firearms has quintupled.

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The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics.

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