Well, each year thousands of people kill people in the United States using handguns as weapons. The carnage wrought by handgun violence is a huge challenge to the criminal justice system. Ma'am The statistics on handgun violence paint an exceedingly grim picture. Some simple numbers reveal the dimensions of the problem. Gun violence is a major epidemic, killing more than 30,000 Americans each year since 1972, with an average of 34,000 each year since 1989.
Handguns cause nearly three times as many injuries each year.
According to a report released last year by the Institute of Medicine, a Washington, D.C. think tank, across the nation firearms are second only to motor vehicles in causing injury deaths. The figure is substantially higher when other related costs are added to the mix, such as time spent by police and healthcare givers, and other factors such as lost income and tax revenue because of injuries and deaths. These numbers give just the grossest outlines of the problem. Health officials and policy makers are clamoring for more statistics about who is being killed and where, along with demographic information and details on the circumstances of the shootings and the types of guns involved. Armed with such information, health experts say, they will be able to craft better and more targeted violence prevention efforts.