With the focus on “Gun Crime,” what percent of Violent Crimes involve Guns? 7.9%

For folks at home, here’s what you need to know: I’ve been at this a long time and there are things we know that work that reduce gun violence and violent crime, and things that we don’t know about. But things we know about: Background checks for purchasing a firearm are important; a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — no one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something . . .

Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden and Attorney General Garland on Gun Crime Prevention Strategy,” The White House Briefing Room, June 23, 2021.

Biden’s April and June presentations on violent crime focused on gun crime. Indeed, the White House titled both talks this way: “Remarks by President Biden on Gun Violence Prevention” and “Remarks by President Biden and Attorney General Garland on Gun Crime Prevention Strategy.”

He mentioned “gun” or “firearm” 142 times. By contrast, the words “crime,” “violence,” or “violent” were mentioned 110 times. Many times those words were use in conjunction with guns, such as “gun violence” 32 times.

Biden’s number one solution is background checks on private gun transfers. His second solution is an assault weapons ban.

But the National Crime Victimization Survey, in the latest year that it is available, 2016, show that there were 5,353,820 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults (Table 1) and 17,413 murders. Firearms were used 414,440 incidents for rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults (Table 13 Appendix) and 10,398 murders. Adding those up indicates that 7.9% of violent crime incidents involve firearms. If you count it by crime victims, fewer than 10% of violent crime victims, involve crimes using firearms (9.28%).

But if Biden is worried about assault weapons, just 258 of the 17,413 murders in 2016 involved any type of rifle — 1.48%. Overall violent crimes don’t have them broken by type of gun used, but rifles are obviously a very time portion of violent crimes. (In 2019, the percent was 2.2%.)

For Biden who keeps talking about reducing violent crime, why does he focus on such a small portion of it?

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