John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News starts this way:
Which is more likely to kill you: a car or a gun? Various publications, from The Economist to Forbes, and many others have been reporting that gun deaths are set to overtake road deaths before the year is up. But not only isn’t that going to happen. Car deaths have indeed fallen more than gun deaths, but that’s not because of comparatively stringent safety regulations.
Gun control advocates brag that they have “a statistic that really resonates with people.”
The latest data we have are from 2013. In that year, 35,598 people died from motor vehicle deaths. 32,888 died from gun deaths. The gap has narrowed since 2000, when motor vehicle deaths were 43,563 and gun deaths were 28,163.
Since the year 2000, motor vehicle deaths only really changed between 2008 and 2010, when the recession was at its worst. During that time, deaths fell by more than 20 percent.
Why the sudden drop? It wasn’t because of any safety regulations suddenly going into effect in late 2007. There’s a much more prosaic explanation: during the recession and anemic recovery, people drove less. Higher gasoline prices continued to make people cut back on driving. . . .
The piece is continued here.
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