A friend and I were discussing the efficacy of gun control as a means of saving lives. He suggested that getting the US out of foreign wars would help more. I begged to differ with him. As usual, I had statistics to back up my argument. Here they are.
In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, 16,899 US personnel were killed in Vietnam. That same year, 54,000 traffic deaths occurred in the US. Things are better now. With all our modern improvements, last year, in 2016, there were “only” 40,200 traffic fatalities.
It’s worse when you look at other wars. For example, on D-Day in World War Two, there were 2,499 verified American fatalities. Last year, in 2016, 11,000 American civilians were killed by guns, nearly five times as many people as were killed in the most famous battle of World War Two. But still, barely 30% of the traffic fatalities.
But it gets even worse than that. World War Two lasted four years, and caused a total of 405,399 American deaths. Last year, cigarette smoking killed about 480,000, about twenty percent more Americans than the entire Second World War. In ONE year! That’s forty-three times the number killed by guns. For every American killed by a gun, forty three are killed by cigarettes, and that does not even include other forms of tobacco!
In fact, only one war in US history has killed more Americans than a single year of smoking-- the Civil War (750,000 deaths, counting both sides). If you want to save lives, don’t ban guns or war. They’re nothing compared to tobacco, the real scourge of our time. This is tacitly admitted by our medical establishment. The website HealthCare.gov, used to enroll Americans in “Obama Care”, is permitted to ask just ONE QUESTION concerning an applicant’s medical or physical condition-- “During the last six months, have you used tobacco products regularly?” The answer to that single question says more about a person’s health than any other thing they could ask.
