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Research Shows Most Mass Murders Not Committed with Firearms

 

By:  David Deschesne

Fort Fairfield Journal, September 11, 2019

 

   The liberal media and politicians have been fixated on homicides committed with firearms for at least the past decade.  However, a researcher in Idaho has found that, historically, less than half of murders in the U.S. were committed with firearms.

 

   For the past 18 months, Clayton Cramer, a history professor at the College of Western Idaho has been compiling data on American mass murders starting in 1657.  He qualifies a 'mass murder' as either three people dead, or two dead and one wounded within a 24 hour period.  So far, Cramer has tallied 504 mass murders, with a total of 6,568 dead.  He admits there are at least 300 more incidents to be added to his list.

 

   Contrary to the mainstream media narrative on guns, less than half of those mass murders were committed with firearms.  Cramer notes that before the proliferation of semi-automatic weapons, such unconventional tools of death such a axes, hatchets, knives, poisons, blunt objects, arson, aircraft, and in 1931, blowtorches, were deployed by nefarious actors to fulfill their evil intentions.  “Where there is an evil will, there’s a way,” said Cramer.  “Even today, about a quarter of our mass murders do not involve firearms: instead, blunt objects, arson, explosives, and motor vehicles, as is the case in countries with much stricter gun laws.”

 

   The mainstream media's play on gun violence makes it seem as though mass murder with firearms is a recent and horrific addition to American culture.  Cramer notes that most of the murders historically were committed with the aforementioned items that are not firearms.  He also notes the inattention the news media gives to mass murder incidents where guns are not involved.    “You probably can’t name the mass murders that killed 87 people in 1990; or 97 people in 1986; or the 1973 New Orleans gay bar with 33 dead.  All were arson, and are nearly unknown because there were no guns.  The 1990 murders were with $1 worth of gasoline bought at a nearby gas station; the 1986 murders with a can of camp stove fuel; the 1973 murders were with a can of cigarette lighter fluid bought down the street.”

 

   In his research, Cramer has recorded the proximate causes of the crimes as very diverse and wide-ranging, with mental illness issues at the forefront. “So far, 22% are unknown; often the killer was unknown, and no other evidence established a reason.  Terrorism: 4%.  Mass lynchings: 8.4%.  The single biggest proximate cause is a  murderer with unquestionably severe mental illness: 24%.  Another 3% are likely mental illness and a few other categories certainly hint at it: 2% where usually the father murdered his family and committed suicide to avoid them falling into poverty.”

 

   In the U.S., there are on average 30,000 gun-related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed.  The U.S. population is 324,059,091 as of June 22, 2016, which makes 0.00925% of the population dying from gun-related actions each year.  What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:

 

65% of those deaths are by suicide, which could never be prevented by gun laws.

15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified.

17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug-related, or mentally ill persons – better known as “gun violence.”

3% are accidental discharge deaths.

 

   So technically, “gun violence” is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100.  The way those numbers break down regionally across the US is telling of the impact restrictive gun laws have on society.  For example, the top four U.S. cities with gun related homicides are:

 

Chicago: 480 (9.4%)

Baltimore: 344  (6.7%)

Detroit: 333 (6.5%)

District of Columbia:119 (2.3%)

 

   With some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, Chicago still has the equivalent of a large mass shooting's death numbers every month but not a word about the ineffectiveness of these “common sense gun laws” from the media or the politicians who espouse them.

 

   The statistics show that 25% of all gun crime happens in just four cities, all of which have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause of gun violence and more “common sense” gun laws won't be the solution.

 

    Minus these four cities, it leaves 3,825 gun related homicides for the entire rest of the nation or about 75 deaths per state.  That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others.  For example, California (highly restrictive gun laws) had 1,169 gun related homicides  and Alabama (with much less restrictions on gun ownership) had 1.

 

   In Maine, where gun ownership is ubiquitous, gun violence actually sits in the single digits.  According to the report, Crime in Maine 2016, published by the Maine Department of Public Safety, over a five year period aggravated assaults peaked in 2016 with 1002 reported for that year. The breakdown of that number, however, does not grant any ammunition to the anti-gun/anti-self defense crowd since of those 1002 assaults, only 7.4% actually involved the use of a firearm, which was exceeded by knife/cutting instrument (16%); other dangerous weapon (22.9%); and the most commonly used assault weapon category: Hands/Feet/Fists came in at 53.8%.

 

   Oddly, while firearms came in at the very bottom of the list of weapons used in the assaults in Maine, and Hands/Feet/Fists came in at the very top, followed by other weapons and knives/cutting instruments, the establishment media continues to be fixated on curtailing the right to own firearms as a solution to this problem. The same crowd spouting “common sense gun laws” seems to have nothing to say about “common sense laws” to restrict the use of other items that could be used as weapons—such as baseball bats, ice picks or rocks—or even “common sense knife laws” even though all of those categories continually exceed firearms by double digits in Maine’s Aggravated Assaults category year after year.

 

   The statistics reveal it is not guns causing the crime, but rather the crime rate is spawned by the number of criminals living in those cities and states.  So, if all cities and states are not created equal, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.  Robbery, death, rape, and assaults are all done by criminals.  It is ludicrous to think that criminals will obey gun laws.  That is why they are called criminals.

 

  While death from gun violence is horrific, it gets undue attention from the media - a group that ignores much greater causes of death, such as:

 

40,000+ per year die from a drug overdose.

36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths.

34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities 

200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical errors.  

710,000 people die per year from heart disease.

 

   Since it can be easily shown how death by gun violence is statistically insignificant compared to other much greater causes of death in the U.S., it must be considered that gun control proponents must have an ulterior motive to restrict, or even abolish, ownership of firearms in the U.S.  That motive is to disarm the American people in order to create an entire class of disarmed peasants that will suffer under the hand of a heavily armed and thuggish government - a government that will be the only entity allowed to possess the firearms.  This line of left-wing thinking is what drove the abolishing of guns in Adolph Hitler's NAZI controlled Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Idi Amin's Uganda.  Without the ability of the citizenry to defend themselves from rogue, leftist governments those people suffered abuse, murder and privation from their own governments.  This is the vision the Democrat party has for the U.S. today with their so-called “common sense gun laws” - laws which can only be sold to a gullible American public who have been deprived by the media of all the facts related to the issue.