Tim Kennedy on guns: what the evidence says · JRE #1833
SUBJECT: GUNS
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
He said it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 65%. And then, you know, there's cops killing bad guys. That's a certain percentage of it. And then a giant chunk is gang violence.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Kennedy's claim that suicides account for about 65% of gun violence deaths is directionally correct but somewhat overstated. CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which tracks all violent deaths (not firearm deaths alone) across the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico, found that in 2022, 60.6% of the 74,148 recorded violent deaths were suicides, 30.2% were homicides, and 1.4% were legal-intervention deaths (police use of deadly force); the 2021 NVDRS report shows a similar pattern. When narrowed specifically to firearm deaths, the suicide share is typically somewhat lower than the all-manner figure, commonly cited in the 54-56% range, because homicides are more heavily concentrated in firearm methods than suicides are. Kennedy's 65% figure sits above both the all-violent-death and firearm-specific CDC estimates, and his claim loosely conflates "gun violence deaths" with all violent deaths. The broader shape of the claim, that suicides form the largest single share of gun-related deaths, exceeding homicide and police-shooting categories combined, is well-supported by CDC data, but the specific 65% figure is on the high end and imprecise about which death category it describes.