Stunning and Accurate Statistic Gets Renewed Interest
By Samuel Warde
In
a late 2012 segment of PBS NewsHour, liberal commentator Mark Shields told
host Judy Woodruff that more Americans have died from guns than in all U.S.
wars combined:You know, Judy, the reality is — and it’s a terrible reality — since Robert Kennedy died in the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country’s history, from the Revolutionary through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, in those 43 years. … I mean, guns are a problem. And I think they still have to be confronted.
PolitiFact conducted a
study at the time to determine the validity of Shields’s claim using the Congressional Research Service and “rated his claim True.”
In a 2013 follow up piece, PunditFact[1] made
a few adjustments to PolitiFact‘s initial figures, but once again
confirmed the claim.
Like PolitiFact, PunditFact used the Congressional Research
Services report, but supplemented that with one from iCasualties.org, an independent website created
in May 2003 by Michael White, a software engineer from Stone Mountain, Georgia,
to track casualties in the Afghanistan War and Iraq War.
As
PunditFact reported:
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.
PunditFact
used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track 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.
The
final results of their research confirmed that “The number of gun deaths since
1968 — including… 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.
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.
FOOTNOTE 1: PunditFact is a project of the Tampa Bay
Times and the Poynter Institute (the owners and creators of PolitiFact).