Like a lot of Americans, I've had some very heated discussions lately about gun control.  In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, I did some research on gun violence on my own and came up with some eye-opening statistics (go to page 84).

It seems that you are almost as likely to die from falling down than getting shot (31.2K vs 33.6K).  Still tragic, I know, but the data gets more interesting when you get into the details.

Of the 33.6K gun deaths (all data is from 2013), 21.2K are suicides, 11.2K are homicides, 0.5K are unintentional (I would call this non-gun safety), another 0.5K are legal intervention (such as shot by authorities in the commission of a crime), and about 0.3K are of undetermined causes.

Drilling down a little more, estimates on the percentage of homicides that are either gang-related or criminal-on-criminal range from 70% to 80%; I opted for a low estimate of 71%, which of the 11.2K listed above would account for 8.0K.

If you subtract the suicides, accidents, and criminal deaths from the total, you are left with around 3.5K (for the sake of argument, I'll assume all of the undetermined deaths don't fit any of those categories).

The U.S. population for 2013 was 316M.  That would mean that the 3.5K gun deaths would be about 0.001% of the population.  Unless you wanted to kill yourself.  Unless you didn't practice gun safety.  Unless you hang out with criminals.  In those cases, the rate goes up, and you've got a different set of problems to address.

The upshot is, you are roughly nine times more likely to die from falling than to be the victim of a random (or maybe even not so random) shooting.

Conclusion – however tragic any death may be, are we really going to upend civil liberties based on such a tiny percentage?  If so, I want to see commonsense ladder control, too.