By Louis Jacobson on Friday, January 18th, 2013 at 11:27 a.m.
Commentator Mark Shields said more Americans have been killed by gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars in the nation’s history. Is that correct?
Since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., supporters and opponents of gun control have thrown out statistics to support their point of view.
Here’s one that caught our eye, offered by liberal commentator Mark Shields on the Dec. 21, 2012, edition of the PBS NewsHour.
Shields told host Judy Woodruff, “You know, Judy, the reality is — and it’s a terrible reality — since Robert Kennedy died in the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country’s history, from the Revolutionary through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, in those 43 years. … I mean, guns are a problem. And I think they still have to be confronted.”
Is the death toll that high? Let’s examine each half of his comparison.
Deaths from warfare
We found a comprehensive study of war-related deaths published by the Congressional Research Service on Feb. 26, 2010, and we supplemented that with data for deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan using the website icasualties.org. Where possible, we’ve used the broadest definition of “death” — that is, all war-related deaths, not just those that occurred in combat.
Here’s a summary of deaths by major conflict:
| Revolutionary War |
4,435 |
| War of 1812 |
2,260 |
| Mexican War |
13,283 |
| Civil War (Union and Confederate, estimated) |
525,000 |
| Spanish-American War |
2,446 |
| World War I |
116,516 |
| World War II |
405,399 |
| Korean War |
36,574 |
| Vietnam War |
58,220 |
| Persian Gulf War |
383 |
| Afghanistan War |
2,175 |
| Iraq War |
4,486 |
| Total |
1,171,177 |
Gunfire deaths
The number of deaths from gunfire is a bit more complicated to total. Two Internet-accessible data sets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allow us to pin down the number of deaths from 1981 to 1998 and from 1999 to 2010. We’ve added FBI figures for 2011, and we offer a number for 1968 to 1980 using a conservative estimate of data we found in a graph in this 1994 paper published by the CDC.
Here is a summary. The figures below refer to total deaths caused by firearms:
| 1968 to 1980 | 377,000 |
| 1981 to 1998 | 620,525 |
| 1999 to 2010 | 364,483 |
| 2011 | 32,163 |
| Total | 1,384,171 |