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Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Death


The Guardian now is now keeping track of people killed by the police in the USA. Commercial news media thrives on this sort of thing, especially when there is any doubt about whether it was justified or not, and of course, there is always some doubt in someone's mind. For instance, if they killed me I would be absolutely certain it wasn't justified.
    A fair number of the people killed by police can be classified as 'suicide by cop'. It might be a sin to commit suicide, but a significant number of people find life unbearable for one reason or another and choose to leave. Some of them want to die without having to actually kill themselves, and suicide by cop is one alternative. All you need is a gun, most any sort will do, and the ability to act determined. The cops will take care of the rest.
    From the table above you can see that gun deaths are way down on the list. Homicide isn't even on the CDC's list of leading causes, I added it so we could compare. Note that almost half of the suicides are done with guns.
    And then there is 'Other', which kills more people than any other cause, and what are we doing about that?

Guardian link via Detroit Steve. Gun death numbers are from the Wikipedia page and are probably not for the same year as the CDC numbers. All other numbers are from the CDC, except 'Other', which was calculated.
 

2 comments:

AndrewP said...

Enquiring minds want to know how effective is 'suicide by cop'? It would be dependent on a civil servants marksmanship for a nice clean one shot kill vs the more probable disabling painful disfiguring nonfatal shot that would land the perp into a noisy smelly concrete tiny cell for the remainder of his miserable existence.
The stats on this probability would be of the utmost importance, it would seem.

AndrewP said...

Enquiring minds want to know how effective is 'suicide by cop'? It would be dependent on a civil servants marksmanship for a nice clean one shot kill vs the more probable disabling painful disfiguring nonfatal shot that would land the perp into a noisy smelly concrete tiny cell for the remainder of his miserable existence.
The stats on this probability would be of the utmost importance, it would seem.