By Dean Weingarten
Arizona – -(Ammoland.com)- There is some coverage of this number, which varies quite a bit from year to year.
The number being shown is 33, but that appears to include one accident.
The trend is down, though not as much as the homicide rate in general. It is clear that the number of citizen owned guns is not linked to the number of police killed with guns.
While the number of guns in the hands of the public has soared, and the number of people legally carrying firearms has skyrocketed, crime is down, homicides are down, and then number of police murdered with guns is down.
The public has been on a buying binge for semi-automatic rifles, such as the AR-15, which has become the most popular rifle in America after the “assault weapon ban” lapsed in 2004, and especially since 2008. From 1995 to 2004, during the “ban“, the number of police murdered with guns averaged 58.1 officers per year, from 2005 to 2013, after the “ban” lapsed, the number averaged 51.6 per year.
This is not surprising. Rifles are seldom used to murder, and semiautomatic rifles, while very popular, are a minority of all rifles. Hands and feet are used to murder twice as often as rifles are.
Three of the police murdered with firearms in 2013 were killed by a former police officer bent on revenge for perceived corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department.
The number of police killed while on duty, from antebellum times to present, are on this website.
©2013 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch
About Dean Weingarten;
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of constitutional carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
Looks like automobiles are more dangerous than gun owners… maybe banning automobiles would save a lot more lives than banning guns. /sarcasm
Automobile accident: 26
Motorcycle accident: 4
Struck by vehicle: 7
Vehicle pursuit: 3
Vehicular assault: 5
Thank God for the police we have. One thing for sure we need them to keep watch on people with attitudes like Darren. There are a lot of bad cops out there, especially in small towns where the force is mostly made up of wanna-bees, but over all there are a lot more good cops than bad. You are exactly right on the abundant guns in civilian hands keeping crime down. The little state I live in had only one cop killed in the line of duty in 2013 and that was by his own hands. He got caught with… Read more »
Oh so you know it’s not a tough job because you have done it, right? This number is only deaths- not the much larger number of officers assaulted, many of them career ending injuries. So let’s get rid of police and what….. let people like you police themselves??? Maybe you should keep your moronic comments to yourself.
A good way to have zero cops killed is to fire them all. Anyway, just another bit of proof that abundant guns in civilian hands make for less crime not more. This is also a debunking of the cop worshiper’s BS that the costumed clowns have a tough dangerous job.