The True Odds of Shooting a Bad Guy With a Gun

More than 30,000 people are shot and killed in the U.S. each year. About two-thirds of these, 20,000 people, are suicides. In other words, two out of three people who use a gun to kill a person use it on themselves.

A bit less than a third of all gun deaths are homicides. That's about 10,000 people a year or roughly twice as many pedestrians as get hit by cars. In America, you're more likely to get hit by a bullet than a car.

Homicides are often classified as one individual intentionally killing another. Walking into a room with a handgun you think isn't loaded and accidentally shooting your old girlfriend's boyfriend (who used to be your best friend) as he tries to jump out of the way is considered an accident by most law enforcement officials. Ultimately, someone must decide whether something is a homicide or accident and justifiable or not. This is necessarily subjective. But there are about 500 gun accidents of this kind a year. One out of 10 of them will be a child.

Homicides are against the law and this really is a law worth enforcing. Statistics show that most people think about killing someone else at least every once in a while. Statistics also show that the people we tend to think about killing most are the people we actually hang out with. Et tu, Brute, and that kind of thing. You can see how this could turn bad pretty quickly. A law against homicides is a law that protects potential murderers from being lonely because they killed all of their friends.

Do we need guns to protect ourselves?

People like to argue that they need guns to protect themselves. About 250 Americans manage to shoot a bad guy per year. Again, this is based on people deciding whether or not something was justifiable. Also, many people may protect themselves without shooting the bad guy. It's impossible to estimate this protective effect without making a lot of assumptions. For example, it's hard to know how often that "This property is protected by Smith & Wesson" sign works, but I imagine it occasionally does. So we have to take what follows with at least two big grains of salt.

Given these important caveats, let's do the math on what remains, noting that the numbers are probably not precise and will change over time. Also, for the sake of simplicity, I am calling "shooting the bad guy" a justified death.

What we find is this:

• One justified gun death per 2 accidental deaths
• Five justified deaths per accidental child death
• About 1000 illegal deaths per justified death
• About 100 suicides per justified death
• About 100 homicides per 2 justified deaths

Those odds are way worse than flipping a coin. At least then, a gun would have a 50% chance of killing a bad guy.

A person pulling the trigger on a gun is most likely to be shooting themselves, then their family, then commit a felony, then way, way, way down the line, if they're lucky, they hit a bad guy.

To add some more painful perspective, you are more likely to be shot by a hunter than by a terrorist. Hunters accidentally shoot about 1000 people a year, roughly 50 times more than terrorists. About 500 people a year are killed by mass shooters. But these numbers fluctuate rapidly.

The odds of shooting a bad guy without a gun are zero. But some may consider having a gun a bit like drinking a steady regimen of Drano to prevent parasites that may not ever actually appear. It could work.

The reality seems to be that when our bullets don't wind up in non-human animals or street signs, then when you use one to shoot someone, about 99 times out of a 100, you will commit a felony, shoot yourself, or shoot someone by accident. In roughly one out of a hundred cases, you shoot the bad guy.