For the US to collect and destroy the same proportion of firearms that Australia did it would require a buyback of 90m firearms, according to a leading Australian researcher, at a cost that might be in the billions if the US paid fair market value for the weapons.
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed that the West Midlands has a higher proportion of firearms offences per 100,000 of its population than London, although those figures also include air weapons and an unknown number of incidents in which a firearm may not actually have been used.
The proportion of firearm injuries caused by self-harm increased with age, reaching 38.8% among those aged 65 and over.
However, because firearms are such a lethal means of suicide, suicide comprises a higher proportion of firearm mortality by intent (Fowler et al., 2015).
Older adults constitute a much smaller proportion of firearm injuries in both ED SS and SPARCS, 0.6 and 0.8 %, respectively (see Table 5).
That we find a similar proportion of firearm ownership across these two groups suggests that the difference in suicide risk by VHA status is attributable to other factors.
The proportion of firearm injuries caused by assaults was far higher for non-Whites than Whites, and was the intent in more than 70% of all firearm injuries among Blacks and Hispanics.
Among the legal intervention patients, those between the ages of 15 and 24 years (33.0 %) accounted for the highest proportion of firearm-related injuries, whereas those 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, and 55 and older accounted for 29.0%%, 19.2 %, 9.8 %, and 7.1 %, respectively.
The study found that handguns account for the majority of childhood gunshot wounds, and states with higher percentages of household firearm ownership have higher proportions of firearm injuries among children.
For example, Judge Collyer cited a General Accountability Office report concluding that a "large proportion of the firearms fueling Mexican drug violence originated in the United States, including a growing number of increasingly lethal weapons".
An analysis of individual-level data found that simply requiring respondents to surrender firearms did not reduce the proportion of respondents who possessed firearms or the rate of firearm-related IPV (Moracco et al. 2006).
