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From: cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Congratulations to the NRA
Message-ID: <251@kontron.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Jun-85 15:56:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: kontron.251
Posted: Mon Jun 17 15:56:33 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Jun-85 04:21:35 EDT
References: <484@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP> <321@spar.UUCP>
Organization: Kontron Electronics, Irvine, CA
Lines: 21

> >    The hail of bullets was responsible for 16,575 suicides, 13,841 murders,
> > 1,756 accidental deaths, 540 undetermined deaths and 276 killing by
> > law enforcement agents. (In 1982)
> 
> More than half of the firearms deaths were *suicides*?  Interesting.
> Can anyone else out there confirm this?
> 
> 					Baba

Consistently about 60% of firearms deaths are suicides, according to NRA's
publications, and what little I have been able to find in supposedly 
objective publications.  I suspect a great many of the "accidental" deaths
are in fact covered up suicides; a great many "accidental" firearms deaths
are while cleaning handguns, and it seems from the items I have read in the
paper concerning these "accidents" that they are frequently white men over
60 --- the group that disproportionately commits suicide in our society.
(Perhaps the grief of being "the oppressors" of all those blacks and women
add up :-).)

Incidentally, you have to be a *real* bozo to shoot yourself while cleaning
a gun --- so bozo I suspect you would have to be drunk.