Gun Statistics
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service with me, Tim Harford. This week, the strange mathematical art of juggling.
So this is 4440.
But first, the massacre of 20 children and six women at a school in the United States has reopened the debate on gun ownership in the US. Here's President Barack Obama speaking at a vigil in Newtown, Connecticut, a few days after the killings. Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? The debate hasn't just been taking place in the US, but all around the world and across social media. A popular message that's been posted and reposted has been this.
Last year, handguns killed 48 in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 21 in Sweden. 10,728 in the United States. Gun control now.
It does look plausible. After all, the US is a big country and we know there are a lot of murders there. But we thought we'd check out the numbers all the same. And the numbers turn out to be quite a puzzle. Well, Ruth Alexander's here. What did you find out, Ruth?
Well, my first port of call was the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. It's got figures on firearms homicide for lots of countries, but not for last year. But I found the FBI keeps more up-to-date figures. Those numbers show that there were 12,664 firearms homicides last year. But that doesn't match the statistic everyone's been posting.
How did the Newtown shooting reignite the global gun ownership debate?
It's actually almost 2,000 more deaths.
Well, that's firearms homicides, but the Post specifically mentions handguns, so maybe that explains the mismatch?
Yes, I thought this, and I discovered that you can get data on this for some countries.
I can see from your face that the numbers don't add up.
No, handguns were used to kill just over 6,200 people in the US last year, not almost 11,000. In Canada, it was 94, not 52, and the latest figures for England and Wales show 30 people died from handgun wounds, not 8. But that data relates to 2009-10, not last year, and the data for other countries is either not available or is also out of date.
So these endlessly retweeted numbers are very roughly the right magnitude, but they don't seem to have come from official sources. So where did they come from? Joseph O'Leary from independent fact-checkers Full Fact thinks he's tracked the source down.
We think we've tracked it down to a poster... from the early 80s. Stop handguns before they stop you, it was titled. And it has exactly the same figures as was being tweeted about in the last few days. Were the figures made up for the poster or were they once accurate? We believe they were once accurate. There's a very, very small print on the poster that says, based on 1979 statistics... And if you look a bit further into all sorts of US publications, magazines, etc., they all talk about the FBI's 1979 Uniform Crime Report, which we believe is the source of the figures themselves. So these are essentially 33-year-old figures. Joseph O'Leary from Full Fact.
One of the people who tweeted the disco-era claim about gun deaths was a British TV presenter, Ben Fogel. His tweet was then retweeted by others more than 3,600 times. The next day he tweeted, I have discovered the handgun fact wasn't from last year, but the sentiments remain the same. This second tweet was retweeted by three people. And Ruth, from what we've learned, I think we need to take issue with another statistic. Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post fame has also misspoken on this issue on Twitter.
She said...
In other words, guns kill 30,000 people a year in the US, which they don't.
Well, actually they do, because almost 19,000 people a year kill themselves with guns. Add that to 12,500 firearms homicides and you get to Arianna Huffington's number.
Gosh, although probably not what most people think of when they hear the phrase gun violence. Thank you, Ruth.
What viral handgun death statistics were being shared on social media?
Time for some juggling, I think.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:51
2
How did the Newtown shooting reignite the global gun ownership debate?
1:51–4:29
3
What viral handgun death statistics were being shared on social media?
4:29–6:48
4
How do official firearms homicide counts from the FBI compare to the viral figures?
6:48–9:13
5
Why do handgun-specific and firearms homicide statistics not match across countries?
9:13–9:26