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  • 2016-01-11 (xsd:date)
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  • 80 Percent of Murders Involve Interpersonal Disputes (en)
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  • The above-reproduced image was forwarded to us in early January 2016, with its text reading as follows: The meme quickly leaped from suggesting that it referenced only gun-related homicides committed by 'law-abiding' citizens with guns to making a broader reference to all murders committed in 2012. It concluded by indicating that interpersonal disputes, not other crimes, were at the root 80 percent of all murders recorded in 2012. As its source the meme cited a 20 January 2015 Huffington Post article that maintained: The linked word happened led off-site to the FBI's 2012 Uniform Crime Reports Crime in the United States statistics set. The linked data set was Murder Circumstances by Sex of Victim, and it listed a total of 12,765 murders that occurred in the United States in 2012 (the CDC's totals for the same data set varied slightly, but proportionally so). Of that total, 1,841 murders were designated as felony-related — that is, they occurred during the commission of crimes such as rape, robbery, or burglary. In that particular breakdown, for which gun crimes were not separated, 14.4 percent of murders were attributed to the commission of unrelated crimes. A separate table titled Murder Victims by Weapon tallied 8,855 of those 12,765 murders as firearms-related (broken down into handguns, shotguns, rifles, and other guns). By those raw numbers, 69 percent of the 12,765 murders in the United States in 2012 were gun-related. Most of the remaining murders were committed with knives (1,589), blunt objects or bludgeoning (518), and personal weapons (defined as hands, feet, or other) at 678. The Murder Circumstances by Sex of Victim table provided another number upon which the meme's claims might have been loosely based: 6,205, the number of total murders attributed to other felony type. Those murders were broken down into categories such as arguments over money or property (148), romantic triangles (95), brawls due to the influence of alcohol (82) or narcotics (58). The largest share of that category by far was attributed to other arguments (3,085). A large share of the 12,765 murders in 2012 (4,582) was described as being of unknown circumstances, with the balance (8,183) broken up into the categories of felony crime (1,841) and other (6,205). The combined number of murders in those categories (8,046) roughly tracks with the total number of murders minus the murders of unknown circumstance. So of the total 12,765 murders, 14.4 percent (1,841) were directly crime-related, 48.6 percent (4,806) were related to interpersonal disputes (e.g., romantic triangles, brawls, gang killings), and 35.9 percent (4,582) involved unknown causes. Consequently, the meme's claims cannot be corroborated with any degree of certainty. The large number of murders included in the unknown category sufficiently muddies the waters such that the 80 percent figure is impossible to prove or disprove. If we combine the unknown category figure of 4,582 with all interpersonal disputes (a category that includes snipers, juvenile gang violence, and a whopping 1,826 unspecified other homicides) at 6,205, that adds up to 10,787 murders, which is 84.5 percent of all murders committed in 2012.Some very fuzzy math is needed to allow that 80% of murders were due to arguments between two people by lumping in murders involving other or unknown circumstances with the rest, and by employing some other quantitative tweaks. But those allowances could just as easily be attributed to other causes, which chips away at the meme's basic assertions. (en)
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