When 50 people were shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the toll from gun murders this year rose to somewhere around 6,000 deaths, which means if the trend continues, this year may end up with the highest gun homicide count since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Add to the homicide number the 550 or so victims of police shootings, roughly the same number of accidental gun deaths and the 21,000+ Americans who use a gun to end their own lives, and the total gun mortality number this year may go above 35,000.
There has been an ongoing discussion about the number of gun violence fatalities versus the number of vehicle deaths; some are predicting that the former may finally exceed the latter for the first time this year. Last year after two Virginia journalists were murdered, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed stating that more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States — a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.
Kristof’s attempt to show the extraordinary carnage of contemporary gun violence by comparing it to all wartime casualties was actually a significant understatement about our daily toll of gun deaths and injuries. His figures for wartime mortality included many deaths that didn’t occur anywhere near the battlefield. The numbers for war deaths came from a study published by the Congressional Research Service that set all wartime deaths previous to Iraq and Afghanistan at 1,003,644 — of which slightly less than 60 percent, or 575,359, were classified as ‘battle deaths’.
If we really want to compare wartime casualties to contemporary gun deaths, we should look at the Civil War, which had the most American casualties of any war in our nation’s history. The body count from the Civil War — believed to be 625,000 — accounts for nearly half of all military deaths that have occurred over the course of our nation’s history (recent scholarship may push that number even higher, to 700,000 or more). How could anyone imagine that today’s gun violence, which claims 30,000+ lives each year, would hold a candle to the loss of life that took place between 1861 and 1865?
When you look at the numbers, you can see just how violent we are today. By my calculations, we currently suffer more gun deaths than occurred during the bloodiest war in our entire history, and it has been going on for far longer than the fifty months of the Civil War.
To begin, less than one-third of the military deaths during the War of the Rebellion had anything to do with guns — or any kind of violence at all. According to the 1870 report issued by the Surgeon General, nearly 200,000 Federal troops perished from diseases, like typhus, influenza and other illnesses that came from unclean water, rotten food and communicable bacteria of all kinds. The number of Union soldiers who died on the battlefield, or from wounds suffered in battle, was much smaller: roughly 90,000. Our figures for the rebel side are much less exact, but historians believe that an even greater proportion of Confederate troops died from disease than those that died in and behind Union lines.
Despite the fact that a majority of troops on both sides died from causes other than guns wounds, the Civil War gun death numbers provide a sobering perspective on the rate of civilian gun violence today versus gun violence during the most violent of all our wars. The total number of Union soldiers killed by gunfire between 1861 and 1865 was somewhere around 90,000. Add the accepted estimates of Confederate battle casualties and we wind up somewhere south of 140,000 for the number who were killed on both sides during the war. Looking at the four years between 2011-2014, the total number of Americans killed by guns was 133,149, and adjusting to cover the same 50-month period of the Civil War would bring the contemporary gun death total to more than 140,000.
When we compare numbers on non-fatal gun wounds we also confront a situation that is worse now than back then. On the Federal side there were slightly less than 200,000 gun wounds over four years; the Confederate toll was probably half as great. This means that on average roughly 75,000 Civil War troops were wounded by gunfire each year— less than the 84,000 Americans who were victims of unintentional and intentional non-fatal gun wounds in 2013.
Not only are more Americans shot with guns today, but their wounds are much more severe. Union doctors treated 245,790 soldiers for gunshot injuries during the Civil War, but 70 percent of the wounds were to the arms and legs, so even with rudimentary surgical techniques, nearly all survived. Data from the National Violent Death Reporting System shows that virtually all contemporary fatal gun injuries occur to the head or the body mass and spine; surviving such wounds often leaves the victim with serious, long-term physical and mental distress.
In a New York Times review of Drew Faust’s penetrating, devastating book, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Geoffrey Ward wrote, “Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since.” The terrible news out of Orlando last night is another reminder that we not only continue to experience losses like those suffered from 1861 to 1865; but also we now experience a level of violence and loss of life that is worse.
Mike Weisser is an N.R.A. life member, has a PhD in economic history and is the author of six books on guns.