‘More Americans Have Died From Domestic Gunfire Than All Wars In U.S. History – Is That True’?
Sadly……yes.
‘PBS commentator, Mark Shields, made the claim on December 21, 2012, just a week after the Sandy Hook shootings, and during the PBS NewsHour with Judy Woodruff and Mark Gerson. From the show’s transcript’:
“You know, Judy, the reality is — and it’s a terrible reality — since Robert Kennedy died in the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, more Americans have died from gunfire than died in all the — all the wars, all the wars of this country’s history, from the Revolutionary through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, in those 43 years”.
‘Given what seemed to be a hyperbolic statement – more than all wars in U.S. history? – Pulitzer Prize-winning and fact-checking website, PolitiFact, decided to investigate Shield’s claim’.
‘Putting their iconic “Truth-O-Meter” to work, they came up with some startling facts’.
‘In considering all gun deaths in America since 1968, not just homicides, they gleaned their figures from databases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI’.
‘War deaths were compiled using a comprehensive document prepared by the Congressional Research Service, as well as the website icasualties.org’.
‘The war dead statistics were arrived at by combining “all war-related deaths, not just those that occurred in combat,” which makes the fact that these numbers are dwarfed by domestic gun deaths all the more shocking’.
‘Simple arithmetic tells us Mark Shield’s statement is correct: gun deaths in America since only 1968 exceed the casualty totals of all U.S. wars by 212,994 deaths’.
From : http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/01/20/more-americans-have-died-from-domestic-gunfire-than-all-wars-in-u-s-history-is-that-true/
See : ‘PBS commentator Mark Shields says more killed by guns since ’68 than in all U.S. wars’
@ : http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jan/18/mark-shields/pbs-commentator-mark-shields-says-more-killed-guns/
The Last Of The Millenniums 