PA Bill Number: SB1198
Title: In plants and plant products, providing for plant and pollinator protection; conferring powers and duties on the Department of Agriculture and ...
Description: In plants and plant products, providing for plant and pollinator protection; conferring powers and duties on the Department of Agriculture and .. ...
Last Action: Referred to AGRICULTURE AND RURAL AFFAIRS
Last Action Date: May 17, 2024
Should vehicle-related deaths be part of the gun control debate? :: 11/02/2015
I won’t use the man’s name. He was just a reader who called a colleague in reaction to a story about gun-related deaths and later talked to me. We had a conversation, not an interview.
But I do want to tell you about his main point: Why, he wondered, do some Americans (Democrats, mostly, he told me) want to come down hard on gun deaths with regulations when cars and trucks kill more people in the U.S. than firearms do?
Well …
To address that factual claim first: T’ain’t true.
In 2013, the most recent year for which complete and verified stats are available, 32,719 people in the U.S. died in vehicle-related incidents. That same year, firearms killed 33,636 in the United States. So, coincidentally, they are roughly equal, with the gun deaths slightly greater.
Beyond that, the fatality numbers have been trending in opposite directions, as the chart with this column shows.
Vehicle deaths have dropped 21.6 percent over the past 15 years, from 41,717 in 1999 to 32,719 in 2013, going down every year but one since 2005. Gun deaths, meanwhile, were at 28,874 in 1999 and increased 16.5 percent through 2013.
So, those are the numbers.
But I asked the man what his underlying point was. Did he want to regulate guns less? The same? Or did he want some sort of crackdown on vehicle ownership or use?
Mostly, he likes the status quo, he said. Or, to be precise, he opposes any further regulation of gun ownership.
That, of course, is a huge debate, one that every American who can fog a mirror has heard and/or participated in for however long he or she has been around and old enough to understand such things.
But what I have a problem with is the equivalency that the reader was suggesting between guns and motor vehicles. He and I had a lively discussion on the subject.
A gun, first of all, is a machine with a very specific purpose: to expel projectiles at a high rate of speed, projectiles that then either hit an inanimate object (such as a target, a clay pigeon or whatever gets in the way) or flesh and blood. That is, a person or an animal. And those projectiles, as they are intended to do, damage whatever they encounter.
As Gardner Selby recently reported for PolitiFact Texas, a fact-checking project of the American-Statesman, only 505 of those 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013 were caused by unintentional discharges of the gun, about 1.5 percent. In another 281 cases, the nature of the shooting was undetermined. So in about 98 percent of the cases, the shooters intended to fire the gun at someone (including, about two-thirds of the time, themselves for the purpose of suicide).
As for the vehicle deaths, yes, sometimes the person might have hit a pedestrian on purpose or at least made no attempt to miss. There’s a trial about to start in Austin this week examining the possibility that that was the case in the 2014 South by Southwest tragedy.
I couldn’t find any breakout of intentional vehicular homicides. I called Chandra Bhat, director of the University of Texas’ Center for Transportation Research, who said he isn’t aware of any research on how often people use a car to attack and kill someone on purpose.
“I’d like to think it’s close to zero percent,” he said.
Anyway, it’s a reasonable assumption that an extremely high percentage of vehicle-related deaths are the result of unintentional crashes, which gets to the purpose of the machines: to carry people or goods to a destination. General Motors is not a weapons manufacturer.
The vehicle deaths, in other words, are a tragic byproduct of unrelated and nonviolent activity, not part and parcel of the equipment’s function.
Beyond that, vehicles are highly regulated. To own one legally, you have to register the vehicle with state government, paying an annual fee. The vehicle has to pass a yearly safety inspection. To drive it on public roads — again, legally — you have to pass tests (for eyesight and knowledge of road laws) and get a license.
Vehicle laws are constantly updated in an attempt to make both the car and the driver less likely to cause harm. Consider seat belt, drunken driving and cellphone use laws, for instance. In major part, these improvements are why vehicle deaths, while a terrible thing in each case for the victim, family and friends, have decreased from an annual high of 54,052 in 1972 to the current figure, a drop of more than 21,000.
Guns laws vary from state to state, and I’m no expert. But even the reader I talked to agreed that in many cases a person can legally own and operate a gun without any involvement with the government.
One other element: Most people drive their cars every day, several times a day. Sometimes for hours a day. That gun, on the other hand, generally sits in the drawer or closet or locker unused, even by enthusiasts but especially by the person keeping it only for home protection, for great stretches of time. So, looked at on the basis of deaths per hour of usage, the guns are far more lethal.
Yes, I know: the Second Amendment. Motor vehicles (or horses and buggies, for that matter) are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, for the obvious reason that James Madison and his buddies did not anticipate the internal combustion engine. Firearms and that well-regulated militia, as we all know, are in the document.
As I said above, how to regulate gun ownership is a huge, seemingly intractable subject, and I make no argument here on that.
But let’s leave car and truck fatalities out of the debate. Yes, the U.S. has about the same number of deaths annually caused by vehicles and guns, at least for now. And, according to some estimates, the U.S. has roughly 300 million privately held firearms and around 300 million registered vehicles, or about one for every man, woman and child in the country.
But coincidence does not amount to equivalence.
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/local/should-vehicle-related-deaths-be-part-of-the-gun-c/npDBy/
