“Regardless, the data above shows that since the early 1990s, non-gun homicides have seen a steady decline in terms of raw numbers and rates with the exception of the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. Gun homicides, however, have been much more volatile, with several periods of increase and decrease.
“The spike in gun homicides in the last two years could simply be a more extreme case of that volatility. Or, it could be an inflection point, indicating that firearms have become so numerous in society that they’re more readily available than ever to people wanting to do ill with them. If that’s the case, we might expect to see gun homicides continue to increase even as other forms of homicide become more rare.” – Christopher Ingraham in Guns are responsible for the largest share of U.S. homicides in over 80 years, federal mortality data shows [via washingtonpost.com]
