Guns in America by the numbers

A Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle similar to this model was used in the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The Bushmaster is a direct descendent of the fully automatic M-16 rifle used for decades by the U.S. military.


Truth is often the first casualty in political warfare and there are plenty of untruths being spewed into the debate over gun control in the United States. The statistics listed below were picked selectively from U.S. Justice Department reports to shine light on many of the key factors and considerations related to gun violence in America:

- There are about 310 million firearms in private hands, including 114 million handguns. There were about 200 million guns in private hands in 1994.

- From 1999 to 2003, an average of 11,345 Americans were shot to death in homicides.

- Homicides committed with firearms peaked in 1993 at 17,075.

- About 68 percent of the 16,929 murders in 2007 were committed with firearms.

- In 2008, 303,880 victims of violent crimes stated they faced an offender with a firearm.

- Incidents involving a firearm represented 7 percent of the 5.1 million rapes, sexual assaults, robberies, and aggravated and simple assaults committed in 2008.

- According to a 1997 survey of prison inmates, 80 percent of the convicts who had possessed a gun at the time of their arrest obtained the weapon from family, friends, a street buy, or an illegal source.

- Of the 55 law enforcement officers killed in 2005, 50 were shot to death, and 45 of those cop killers were armed with handguns.

- An estimated 57,500 nonfatal gunshot wounds from assaults were treated in hospital emergency departments from June 1992 through May 1993. Over half of those victims were black males.

- From the inception of the Brady Act in 1994 to the end of 1999, about 536,000 of the more than 22.2 million individual applications to purchase or pawn firearms were rejected based on federal, state or local laws. The Brady Act is named for Jim Brady, a former White House press secretary who survived a gunshot wound to the head inflicted during an assassination attempt on President Reagan.

- In 1999, of the 123,000 gun purchase rejections made by state and local agencies, 73 percent were rejected because of a felony conviction or indictment. Domestic violence convictions or restraining orders accounted for 11 percent of the rejections.

- In 2011, about 45 percent of Americans over age 18 had guns in their homes.