Recently, you may have heard gun control activists saying that "guns kill more people than cars in this country", which is simply and flatly false.
Or rather, it is a deliberate manipulation of statistics, and insanely specific and historically unique cherry picking, to blatantly lie about reality.
The proper way to deal with these types of long term trends, is with a 20 or even 30 year moving average... Most categories of stats like these use 20 year most of the time, so I'll use the 20 year moving averages here to illustrate...
On average, over the last 20 years, appx. 40-45,0000 people die in automobile related fatalities in the U.S. annually (the 20 years prior to that, it was more like 50,000). On average over the past 20 years appx. 35,000- 40,000 people die of gunshot wounds in the U.S. every year (and up until 2017 that moving average was much closer to 35,000, but we have seen a significant increase in both violent crime, and suicide, since either 2016 or 2017 depending on which analysis of which dataset etc...).
...(Notably, BOTH had been consistently and significantly going down since between 1991 and 1994 depending on how you count which datasets etc...)...
Of firearms related deaths, on average, appx. 55% to 60% of deaths by firearms, are intentionally self inflicted...Suicides... and of the remaining 40% appx. 60% are one criminal shooting another criminal; meaning appx 85% of all firearms related deaths have nothing to do with either crimes against the innocent, or with accidents. And only appx. 1-3% of firearms deaths are accidental depending on the year (most years it's barely over 1% but the error bars here are a little higher because of statistical methodologies and dataset variability).
Yes, sadly, most years, about half the rest... 7-8%... are in fact innocent victims of violent criminal strangers or acquaintances. Even more sadly, in most years, the other half...again 7%-8% of the total... are some kind of domestic violence, or otherwise homicide by a friend or family member not otherwise involved in a separate criminal act.
... HOWEVER... There IS a scanty thin film of justification covering their lies... And gun control advocates ALWAYS lie...
There is only one year in all of U.S. history that the absolute number of motor vehicle related fatalities were exceeded by the absolute number of firearms related fatalities... 2020 (though depending on exactly how you calculate them and which dataset you use, the RATES per capita crossed each other in 2017, 2019, and 2020).
You know... 2020... The year where most people were locked down most of the year, and severely limited travel the rest of the year... Total non-commercial trips taken, total non-commercial passenger miles travelled, total trips, and total vehicle miles driven, all fell between 30% and 50% for that one year... Meaning total fatal accidents were way down (though the rate per mile was up slightly).
While, at the same time, amidst a significant increase in both violent crime and suicide beginning in 2016 or 2017; we experienced the largest single year surge of violent crime in American history (even worse than 1968, 1986, or 1991). This, as most major urban areas experienced massive waves of rioting, looting, and other violent crime during "protests"; and while many democratic controlled city governments instituted essentially non-enforcement policies, against much urban crime. Finally, at the same time a massive wave of pandemic related suicides was also happening.
This ended up resulting in a single year increase of appx. 20% of violent crime overall (maybe as much as 30% depending on how you count violent crime), and a single year increase of almost 30% in firearms related violent crime.
This combination of a massive anomalous violent crime increase, and a massive anomalous suicide increase; resulted in overall firearms related deaths increasing by about 17% in one year.
... and even then, firearms related deaths were only just barely greater than vehicle related deaths...
We don't yet have the official final numbers for 2021 (prelims typically come out in February, but the final official numbers typically come out around the end of q3 to as late as middle of q4), but all indications are that violent crime is still up, while road usage is still down; but both are far closer to the average of the last 20 years, than the FRIKKEN PLAGUE YEAR.
