Spend any time discussing sensible gun laws, and you will almost certainly encounter the unapologetic gun advocate who blithely asserts that more Americans are killed by hammers or baseball bats than guns. This mythology is thoroughly ingrained on the political right. Even Republican Congressmen repeat it without pause for reflection. Take for example, Georgia Representative Paul Broun (R), who stated in 2013 that: ?there are more people killed with baseball bats and hammers than are killed with guns”. The theme is popular on social media memes as well. But is it true? The answer is an emphatic no.
In 2013, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, 69 percent of U.S. Homicides (8,454 murders) were committed with a firearm. Only 3.5 percent (428 murders) were committed using a blunt object (a category that includes hammers, baseball bats, tire irons, golf clubs, etc). It is true that blunt objects are actually used in more homicides than rifles. This fact is probably where the idea that hammers or baseball bats are deadlier than guns got started. Later that argument morphed into the absurdly inaccurate argument that blunt objects kill more people than all guns. They kill more people than rifles, but guns are used in nearly twenty times as many homicides as blunt objects. In fact, guns are used in over twice as many U.S. murders as all other weapons combined.
Factor in suicides and accidental deaths and the gun comparison becomes even sillier. The annual number of gun deaths in the United States is around 32,000. Suicides account for nearly 20,000 gun deaths annually. Accidental shootings add around 600 more. Accidental deaths from hammers or baseball bats are rare. Suicide by bashing one’s own head in with a Louisville slugger is, understandably, even rarer. It is difficult to keep swinging at yourself once you have knocked yourself unconscious. So this method of suicide is virtually unthinkable.
Acknowledging that nearly 70 percent of U.S. homicides and 50 percent of U.S. suicides involve a gun, doesn’t necessarily require a restrictive policy towards firearms. But it does require that we recognize that when it comes to murdering others, or killing yourself, guns are the undisputed weapon of choice in the United States. At the very least, we all need to be honest about that.
Keith Brekhus
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Keith Brekhus is a longtime political activist who currently resides in Red Lodge, Montana. He has a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He was a Green Party candidate for Congress in 2002. His most recent political job was working as a Field Organizer in Arizona’s White Mountains, in support of Democratic Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick’s successful 2014 re-election campaign.
