More Americans Are Killed by Guns Since 1968 Than in All U.S. Wars

I weep as I read and post this. My heart just aches. All of our hearts need to ache about this. Truly, we all need to care and to stop the deadly normalization of violence in America. We have been the long, long story of the frog in the frying pot slowly being boiled to death. It is time, far past time, that we feel the heat. We need to be that brave. Brave enough to open our hearts and minds and see, truly see what is happening all around us and within us. We can do this. We can heal and transform our blind spots and denials and minimizations and empathic failures into remembrance of our greater wisdom and knowing and consciousness and fierce caring for life, all life. We need to look at and absorb THIS: "Even using a significantly higher estimate for Civil War deaths than we did the last time we fact-checked this claim, the comparison still holds up. The number of gun deaths since 1968 — including, as Kristof was careful to note, both homicides and suicides — was higher than war fatalities by roughly 120,000 deaths, or almost four years’ worth of gun deaths in the United States." This is profoundly unacceptable. We humans can get off this suicidal path and evolve. It is time. It is far past time. - Molly

By Louis Jacobson

In a column published shortly after the on-air slayings of two TV journalists in southwestern Virginia, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof offered some "data points" about the pervasiveness of gun violence in the United States.

One of them was: "More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history."

That sounded familiar. Really familiar. As it turns out, the web version of Kristof’s column sourced a PolitiFact article from Jan. 18, 2013, that fact-checked commentator Mark Shields’ claim that since 1968, "more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country's history." (Shields used the year 1968 because it was the year presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by gunman Sirhan Sirhan.)

We rated the claim True.

Two and a half years later, we wondered whether the statistic still held up, so we took a new look at the data.

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 up-to-date 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.

The one change we’ve made since our initial fact-check is to revise upward the number of Civil War deaths. As several readers pointed out after we published our earlier fact-check, the CRS report cited 525,000 Union and Confederate dead, but a subsequent study revised that estimate upward to 750,000. The study’s author acknowledged a great deal of uncertainty about the proper figure, and some experts later questioned whether it’s wise to include so many deaths from disease — perhaps two-thirds of the 750,000 figure — since disease in an era of relatively primitive medicine was so widespread that it’s unclear what share of fatal disease during that period was really a result of the war.

Still, we’ll err on the side of the higher estimate and use the 750,000 figure this time.

Please continue this article here: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/27/nicholas-kristof/more-americans-killed-guns-1968-all-wars-says-colu/