Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that firearm-related homicides surged during Barack Obama’s last two years in office.
According to the CDC, “the number of firearm-related homicides was relatively stable during 2010–2014,” then firearm-related homicides sharply increased.
For example, there were 11,008 firearm-related homicides in 2014 and that number rose to 14,415 in 2016. That is a 31 percent increase.
The CDC reports that “use of firearms was the most common method [of homicide] in the United States [2010-2016], followed by the use of instruments for cutting and piercing and then suffocation.” However, if we break the category of firearms down by examining the type of gun used in each homicide, we quickly see that knives–and even fists–were more widely used than many of the specific kinds of firearms Democrats’ seek to ban.
For example, FBI crime stats for 2016 show over four times more people were stabbed to death than killed with rifles of any kind. This means knives and other sharp objects were far more common for homicide use than were AR-15s, AK-47s, etc. And FBI crime stats for 2015 show nearly twice as many people were killed with bare hands than with rifles, period. And because AR-15s and AK-47s only represent a small sliver of the rifles available today, these stats mean hands and fists were used as deadly weapons much more often than AR-style rifles.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator ofDown Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.