Back on Monday: Joe Nocera's Hammer report

The new meme among gun absolutists appears to be hammers. “Why did you elect to report on guns as a choice of weapon, when according to current F.B.I. stats, bear claw hammers and baseball bats are the number 1 and number 2 choice of weapon?” wrote a pro-gun reader: “Guns are 3rd.”

When I was interviewing Second Amendment absolutists for Saturday’s column, I heard the same thing. So of course, Jennifer Mascia and I looked into it. Guess what? It doesn’t appear to be true, as Slate reported in February. According to F.B.I. data, if you add up all the non-gun methods used to kill people in 2011 (fire, drowning, poison, strangling, hammers, etc.), you get 4,081 non-gun homicides. That’s fewer than half of the F.B.I.’s reported 8,583 gun homicides in 2011. Guns killed more than 17 times more people than hammers and are responsible for nearly 70 percent of total murders. Indeed, Slate reported, “only 496 people were killed by blunt objects, a category that includes not just hammers and baseball bats but crowbars, rocks, paving stones, statuettes, and electric guitars.”

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