After I read this past weekend's strip, I was intrigued by it. So was Politifact. Here's their result:
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
In the Sunday, Feb. 13, 2011, installment of the comic strip Doonesbury, Mark Slackmeyer -- a longtime character in the strip who is a liberal radio host -- makes a point about gun violence.
"What are we like as a people?" Slackmeyer muses to himself in his studio. "Nine years, ago we were attacked -- 3,000 people died. In response, we started two long, bloody wars and built a vast homeland-security apparatus -- all at a cost of trillions! Now consider this. During those same nine years, 270,000 Americans were killed by gunfire at home. Our response? We weakened our gun laws."
At that point, a whirring sound comes from off-panel. In the final panel, we see that his guest is a space alien, who says, "Fail. Cannot Comprehend." To which Slackmeyer cracks, "Well, you may be a little jet-lagged."
We began by contacting Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist who has drawn Doonesbury for more than four decades. He got back immediately with a summary of his methodology.
"The final figure lacks precision, because it's extrapolated," Trudeau wrote us, noting, correctly, that the most recent data for gun deaths from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is from 2007.
"What I had were six years -- 2002-2007 -- of a remarkably stable number, around 30,000" gun deaths per year, Trudeau wrote. "So in my judgment, multiplying 30,000 times nine yielded a figure reasonable and accurate enough for rhetorical purposes without using hyperbole. If anything, it may be slightly on the low side."
We found that Trudeau was basically right. We went to the same CDC database he used -- the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (or WISQARS for short) -- and got virtually identical numbers.
When are we, a supposedly civilized nation, going to put an end to the NRA's grip on our "pistols"?
