this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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You’re going to make me debate what “usual” is for shootings in the US. That’s a grim one.
About 14k homicides in the US total per year (using 2019 numbers).
About 3300 of these were done with a firearm of unknown type, about 360 with a rifle, about 200 with a shotgun and about 6400 with a handgun.
If we assume the unknown firearms are split the same way as the rifle/handgun split of known firearm homicides then it's about 535 with rifles and about 9525 with handguns. Realistically, it's probably tilted farther towards handguns, just because they are easier to dispose of and harder to recover, but it's close enough. Not including shotguns in that calculation because while there are lots of cases where a given round could come from a handgun or a rifle, there aren't many cases where the same round could have come from one of those or a shotgun.
To continue the breakdown beyond just shootings, about 1500 homicides per year are from knives, about 1600 from other weapons (blunt objects, explosives, poisons, etc) and about 600 done unarmed.
Usual for a shooting in the US is someone engaging in another sort of crime shooting someone else, often someone engaging in a related criminal activity with a handgun. Think gang violence, drug deals gone wrong, that sort of thing. There's a reason gun crime rates are heavily concentrated in cities, and in specific neighborhoods within those cities and it's not because gun control or gun culture is radically different a few blocks away.
Sadly, it’s usual.