by Eric Nelson
The Free Press
The gun lobby loves the aphorism, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." But more often than not, when someone is killed they are on the wrong end of a gun.
According to the King County Medical Examiner, firearms have been the favored method of homicide in King County for at least the past 10 years. While the firearms homicide rate varies from year to year, it has remained fairly constant over the last decade. And in no two consecutive years did the firearms homicide rate drop.
Knives or objects that cause "blunt impacts" are equally if not more available than guns. But they are considerably less convenient to the assailant and generally less fatal to the victim. Guns are simply the easiest, quickest and most impersonal way to kill another person.
The "raw numbers" of accidents, homicides and suicides tell us the ethnic breakdown of firearm victims in 1992. (Although it's not broken out statistically, the Medical Examiner Division's data tells us that victims usually are males between 20 and 50.) When it comes to race, African-Americans make up the majority of gunshot homicide victims (50 percent), while whites follow not far behind. Asians, Native Americans and Hispanics make up the rest.
More than any other racial group, blacks are the victims of homicide in American cities. This speaks volumes about the tragedy of black life today. However, whites were the hands-down losers in the firearms suicide category in 1992. This may suggest cultural differences in the way certain people express their anger, frustration and misery. In King County, blacks make up a third of all homicide victims, while 90 percent of those who turn a gun on themselves are white.
But "raw numbers" are not the whole story, particularly when you consider that King County is 85 percent white and only 5 percent African-American. Asians, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans make up the remaining 10 percent. (For statistical purposes here, these groups are collectively designated "Other.") When figured as a percentage of their total community, a black person's chance of dying on the wrong end of a gun is 0.4 out of every thousand, compared to an "Other's" 0.05 per thousand, and a White's 0.02 per thousand.
That means an African-American living in King County is 20 times more likely to be killed with a gun than a white. When the suicide rate is figured per thousand, whites still have the highest rate, although comparisons with other races are not as dramatic.
Irrespective of race and no matter the degree of gun regulation, we'll probably always have the instinct to kill others or ourselves. But, according to the experts, guns make that impulse much easier and stack the odds against the victim.
The Medical Examiner's report makes note of a study conducted from 1980 to 1986 that compared homicide rates in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., where stricter regulations limit access to guns.
The study concluded: "Despite similar overall rates of criminal activity and assault, the relative risk of death from homicide, adjusted by age and sex, was significantly higher in Seattle than in Vancouver. Virtually all of this assessed risk was explained by a 4.8-fold higher risk of being murdered with a handgun in Seattle as compared with Vancouver." Get a life, Seattle.
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Contents on this page were published in the December/Jan, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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