Due to space restrictions, my soon-to-be published letter to the editor (in Communications of the ACM, responding to the editorial “Can Computer Professionals and Digital Technology Engineers Help Reduce Gun Violence?”) could not contain in-line citations. I have provided this page to allow transparency about where I got my data, and how I synthesized it. Please let me know if I have made any mathematical or interpretive errors. Most of the data referenced below comes from the US government, specifically the CDC and the FBI.

In response to the author's rebuttal: you are conflating "allow" and "accept," and more generally, seem to assume that the desired outcome (less gun violence) can only be achieved by focusing specifically on the symptom (violent use of guns) and not the underlying causes (untreated depression for suicides, and schizophrenia for homicides). For your specific examples: in schools, accidents are mitigated through preventative measures, intentional malicious behavior is deterred through threat of punishment. We don't "allow" fights, per se, but we do accept that they will happen. There is a cost-benefit analysis that we have to make within the confines of fixed resources: should we spend the whole budget on preventing harm from fights? Or do we spend the majority of the budget on maintaining equipment and grounds, where it's most likely to prevent the most amount of injuries? Likewise with bombs: zero is an unacceptable threshold to have. Some people will set off bombs, no matter how much money, law and technology we throw at the problem. Even worse, the more sensitive we are to bombs, the easier it is for people to induce the majority of the logistical and psychological parts of a bombing, with pretty much zero effort... by phoning in a fake threat. Over-focus on a single threat (bombs) also means we're vulnerable to diversification of tactics if somebody really wants to hurt us. Guns aren't why somebody wants to kill themself or someone else, and they aren't the only means by which harm can be done. And if DRM's failure is honestly news to you, I'd be happy to educate you on the many practical failures (while eschewing the ideological and fundamental theoretical flaws of the technology as a whole).