Forty ;percent of Americans know someone who was fatally shot or who committed suicide using a gun, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll shows. In 2013, 11,208 people were the victims of gun homicides, according to the CDC, while another 21,175 used a gun to ;kill themselves. ;Those numbers, however, may understate exactly how entrenched gun violence has become in American society ;– and ;how widely its effects are felt. Twenty-two percent of American adults say they personally know someone who was killed by another person with a gun, with 6 percent saying the victim was someone in their family. Twenty-nine percent of American adults, meanwhile, know someone who used a gun to commit suicide, including 7 percent who said a family member had committed suicide that way. ; Both sets of results …
Forty ;percent of Americans know someone who was fatally shot or who committed suicide using a gun, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll shows.
In 2013, 11,208 people were the victims of gun homicides, according to the CDC, while another 21,175 used a gun to ;kill themselves. ;Those numbers, however, may understate exactly how entrenched gun violence has become in American society ;– and ;how widely its effects are felt.
Twenty-two percent of American adults say they personally know someone who was killed by another person with a gun, with 6 percent saying the victim was someone in their family.
Twenty-nine percent of American adults, meanwhile, know someone who used a gun to commit suicide, including 7 percent who said a family member had committed suicide that way. ;
Both sets of results are pretty much consistent regardless of how old people are, which part of the country they live in, which political party they belong to or how much money they earn.
Despite Americans’ intimate familiarity with gun violence, and their ;tendency to overestimate rises in crimes, ;respondents generally ;underestimated ;the number of annual gun deaths in the country.
Asked ;how many people are killed by a gun in the U.S. each year, including murders, suicides and unintentional shootings, 48 percent ;weren’t able to hazard a guess. Those who did largely undercounted the problem: the median response was just 5,000 people.
;Still, a majority of Americans, 55 percent, say gun violence presents a very serious problem, with 69 percent of those who knew a shooting victim calling it very serious.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Oct. 6-7 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
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40 Percent Of Americans Know Someone Who Was Killed With A Gun
