I think those stat.s are next to useless.
You don't see a rundown of what cars were used in DWI homicides. Even if you did, who cares?!
I would bet that there were zero homicides in 1998 involving a BG using a Webley .455 revolver. I would also bet that there were zero DWI homicides in 1998 involving a drunk driving a 1902 Pierce Arrow.
Is that gun and that car less deadly in the hands of a criminal?
NO!
All those stat's seem to show is that there are many S&W .38's, 357's and 9mm's out there. But, of those 15,913 traces to S&W handguns, what percent is that of the total production of S&W 38/357/9mm handguns?
I can tell you it's a very small portion. There have been something like 8 million M&P .38 revolvers made. (And that number is just the M&P model, not to mention all the other .38 Special S&W revolver models!) Let's say there have only been 1 million 357's and another million 9mm. (I'm intentionally grossly underestimating the number.) So 15,913 divided by 10,000,000. That comes out to about 16 hundreths of 1 percent.
Hmmmm, that's a pretty small number. It's pretty clear to me that the S&W handguns don't go out and kill people by the tens of thousands or millions. Heck, in my opinion it is never the gun that kills, it's the man/woman firing it. Even so, according to Newsweek's numbers 99.84% of all S&W's were not used in "top crimes" in 1998. Granted, not all of those ten million S&W's are still in circulation.
I guess my whole point is that many of the stat.s published in major media are skewed/biased or downright garbage.
This doesn't only apply to firearms. We should take
all statistics we see with a grain of salt.
Whether they're about the likelihood of black males becoming criminals, which car seats are dangerous, how many immigrants don't pay taxes, etc.
Unless you see the exact methods of data gathering, who funded the study (researchers like to please those who pay), how the data is organized, sample size, etc. you just can't put a lot of faith in the results.
The only thing I can tell you is that I know of about a dozen S&W handguns that have never, and will never ever be used in a crime.
Other than that, it's a big confusing world.
-Kframe
[This message has been edited by Kframe (edited December 07, 1999).]