Overall, there are several types of crimes which constitute crimes of violence; they are: murder, robbery, rape/sexual-assault, simple assault, & aggravated assault. Then, depending upon the context, the FBI’s reports will include different subsets of those crimes for a given statistic. Sometimes they will focus on non-fatal crimes, which thus excludes murder. Other times, they will exclude simple assault, to focus on what they used to call “serious violence”, etc.
One of the FBI’s yearly reports on violent crime includes a breakdown by the type of weapon used to commit the crime. While this report contains some information on rape, and some summary data on a few other types of crimes, it only contains the weapon information for: murder, robbery, & aggravated-assault. So, we’ll just look at those, for now.
According to this FBI report, in 2019 [1a] [1b] [1c] [2] [3] [4], acts of violence committed with “hands, fists, feet, etc.” are just as common as those from all types of firearms combined (pistols, rifles, shotguns, etc.).
In fact, this is a recent development; firearms only breaking even in the last few years. For a decade before that, there were actually more acts of violence committed with “hands, fists, feet, etc.” than with firearms.
But, it’s actually even more pronounced than that, because those stats omit both rape & simple assault.
In a similar report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, on “Trends and Patterns in Firearm Violence” [5] from 1993 to 2018:
“From 1993 to 2018, an annual average of 8% of all fatal and nonfatal violence involved a firearm (table 3). The average percentage of nonfatal violence that involved a firearm was 7%. On average, 71% of homicides were committed with a firearm from 1993 to 2018. During the same period, an annual average of 22% of nonfatal violence, excluding simple assault, involved a firearm, including 23% of robberies and 27% of aggravated assaults.”
Something that may jump out at you (and is often referenced by gun control activists) is the part about 71% of murders being committed with a gun. But put that into context with the rest of the data. Murder and gun violence are so rare compared to all the other types of violence, that when you combine them all together, only “8% of all fatal and nonfatal violence involved a firearm” (the actual data table puts the value at 7.6%; the quote is rounding to 8%). And, again, that’s not saying that all of that 8% was murder, but rather that all violent crime involving a firearm COMBINED, is only 8%; meaning that, yes, murder, but also someone getting shot but surviving, someone shooting & missing, and even someone just showing a gun as a threat, all of that kind of stuff combined is only 8% of all violent crime.
So, you might be wondering why there’s such a significant difference between the numbers in that quote, and the graph I showed earlier. Well, first, the numbers in that quote are the average over the entire 26-year period. So, they’re going to be slightly different than the year-by-year numbers I graphed earlier. But as for why there’s such a difference between even the first & second half of that quote, let’s look at the definitions. For the “8%” number, fatal violence is obviously murder, and according to one of the footnotes for the data table they mentioned, the nonfatal violence count “Includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault victimizations.” Then, in the 2nd half of the quote, they give the same stat again, but excluding simple assault.
The big jump all stems from the inclusion or exclusion of “simple assault”. So, what is it? “Simple assault” is defined as “Assaults and attempted assaults where no weapon was used or no serious or aggravated injury resulted to the victim.” [6] So, if you do something that would normally be classified as simple assault, but do the exact same thing with a weapon, it can be upgraded to aggravated assault; often depending upon whether or not the weapon could be interpreted as a “deadly” weapon in the context. The distinction is not about your actions during the assault, but rather whether or not you have a weapon. Even if you didn’t actually touch or injure the person; threats still count. And just to be clear, the object doesn’t have to be designed as a deadly weapon, it’s just about whether it could be used as one. For example, {hammers, cars, and shovels} are not designed as weapons but they can be used as one.
The same is true if you do some action (ex: punch at someone) and miss, vs if you succeed in hitting them, and seriously injure them. If you seriously injure them, it is upgraded to aggravated assault; the distinction is one of outcome rather than intent. To be clear, intent is also one of the things that can cause simple assault to be upgraded to aggravated assault, but my point is that intent is not required.
So, to some degree, it kind of makes sense to exclude simple assault from these statistics, if you want to focus on the more severe crimes, like someone getting murdered or stabbed or severe physical beatings, or whatever. But, at the same time, it’s also really misleading to show statistics about violent crime, in which “hands, fists, feet, etc.” is explicitly included as a type of weapon, but then deliberately exclude the portion of those instances where no one was seriously injured, but at the same time deliberately include all of the instances of violent crime involving {guns, knives, & [other weapons]}, regardless of whether or not someone was seriously injured. Do you see how that inflates the numbers? And make no mistake, huge portions of those other categories do not involve injuries. Especially because, from the same report: [5]
“Overall, victims were more likely to suffer physical injury in nonfatal violence without a firearm (40%) than in firearm victimizations (16%). This pattern also held for victimizations involving serious injury and minor injury. There was no statistically significant difference between the percentage of victims who received treatment for injuries from firearm (47%) and nonfirearm violence (46%).”
Here’s the breakdown of injuries from nonfatal firearm violence:
84% of the victims of nonfatal firearm violence were completely unharmed, and only 2% were actually shot. I’m going to say that again: only 2% of victims from nonfatal firearm violence were actually shot; and only 16% were injured in any way at all.
Interestingly, as that previous quote mentioned, non-firearm violence has a much higher rate of injury:
And here’s both of them put together so you can see how gunshot wounds compare to both firearm & non-firearm related nonfatal violence combined. It’s less than half of 1%:
So, as you can see, acts of violent crime not resulting in serious injury, or even any injury at all, is not something exclusive to “hands, fists, feet, etc.”, which makes it very misleading to exclude simple assault (i.e. no weapon & no injuries), while deliberately including other instances with no injuries simply because a weapon was involved, regardless of whether or not that weapon was actually even used. This distorts the data, and over inflates the apparent magnitude of weapon violence.
Okay, but how common is simple assault? How much does excluding it inflate the numbers? Well, to answer that question, we first have to find a report which contains data on simple assaults in a format that can be compared like-for-like with the other violent crime data. That is actually surprisingly difficult to do, but one source of that information is the “National Crime Victimization Survey” (NCVS) by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which attempts to capture representative data on all crime, regardless of whether or not it was reported to the police, as well as the circumstances & reasons for why crime was not reported; all along with demographic data, etc. However, since the NCVS relies upon interviewing victims, you obviously can’t interview someone if they’re dead, so it does not include data on homicide.
The “Criminal Victimization” [7] report by the BJS is based upon the NCVS, and provides a breakdown, summaries, & analysis of the NCVS data. Thankfully, they provide a like-for-like comparison of the crime estimates for simple assault, alongside the other types of violent crime: aggravated assault, robbery, & rape/sexual assault. And if we graph them out, we see that Simple Assault accounts for the vast majority of all violent crime:
And this trend is consistent:
NOTE: We’ve sort of been beating around the bush on this a bit, and we’ll go into it more in the next article on “Firearm Homicides”, but murder is an extremely small portion of all violent crime, so the fact that these graphs only show “nonfatal” violence, is largely irrelevant; even if we could add murder, the overall trends would remain the same.
So, if we make the comparison fair, and include simple assault, it starts to become clear that guns are not anywhere close to the rampant problem that they are made out to be. The problem is violence in general, and getting rid of guns, won’t do much of anything; they’ll just use something else. In fact, remember that first graph showing the breakdown by weapon? The “Other Weapons” category was 25%; meaning random objects that couldn’t be categorized as any kind of firearm or “cutting instrument”, everything from a rock to a rope to a baseball bat to a car to suffocating someone with a plastic bag; all of that kind of “improvisation” accounted for 25% of all violent crime (both fatal & nonfatal; excluding simple assault).
Continued in Part 2 – Firearm Homicides.
Update – 5/15/2024: I went back to update the statistics to the latest data, and ended up completely rewriting this article. The gist is the same, but I rewrote the wording, changed the flow a bit, and added some new graphs.
Full Series:
Part 1 – Violent Crime By Weapon
Part 2 – Firearm Homicides
Part 3 – “Guns make it easier” and Children Hurting Themselves
Part 4 – Mass Shootings
Part 5 – Why Gun Control Won’t Work & The Gun Show Loophole
Citations
- FBI – Crime in the U.S. [2005 – 2019] – Violent Crime Report
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s- Table 20 – Murder
- Table 21 – Robbery
- Table 22 – Aggravated Assault
- Manual ETL of FBI Violent Crime Data 2005 – 2019 v1.0.1 – [Relational Database] fbi_violent_crime_stats_2005_2019.sql
https://github.com/yurelle/FBI_Violent_Crime_Weapon_Stats
WITH MurderWeapons AS (
SELECT year,
SUM(total_firearms) AS Firearms,
SUM(knives_or_cutting_instruments) AS Knives,
SUM(hands_fists_feet_etc) AS Hands,
SUM(other_weapons) AS Other
FROM fbi_violent_crime_stats_2005_2019.Murder
GROUP BY year
),
RobberyWeapons AS (
SELECT year,
SUM(firearms) AS Firearms,
SUM(knives_or_cutting_instruments) AS Knives,
SUM(hands_fists_feet_etc) AS Hands,
SUM(other_weapons) AS Other
FROM fbi_violent_crime_stats_2005_2019.Robbery
GROUP BY year
),
AggravatedAssaultWeapons AS (
SELECT year,
SUM(firearms) AS Firearms,
SUM(knives_or_cutting_instruments) AS Knives,
SUM(hands_fists_feet_etc) AS Hands,
SUM(other_weapons) AS Other
FROM fbi_violent_crime_stats_2005_2019.Aggravated_Assault
GROUP BY year
)
SELECT murder.year,
murder.firearms + robbery.firearms + aggAss.firearms AS Firearms,
murder.knives + robbery.knives + aggAss.knives AS knives_or_cutting_instruments,
murder.hands + robbery.hands + aggAss.hands AS hands_fists_feet_etc,
murder.other + robbery.other + aggAss.other AS other_weapons
FROM MurderWeapons murder
JOIN RobberyWeapons robbery
ON murder.year = robbery.year
JOIN AggravatedAssaultWeapons aggAss
ON murder.year = aggAss.year;- FBI Defines “Personal Weapons” as “hands, fists, feet, etc.”
- https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2008-2012.xls
- https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/aggravated_assault_table_aggravated_assault_types_of_weapons_used_percent_distributioin_by_region_2012.xls
- FBI Defines “Strong-arm” as “Hands, Fists, Feet, Etc.”
- BJS – Trends and Patterns in Firearm Violence, 1993–2018
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tpfv9318.pdf - FBI – Offense Definitions
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/offense-definitions - BJS – Criminal Victimization, 2020
https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/cv20.pdf
