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You know I've seen this argument repeated by commenters on Steve Sailer's blog and I wondered: there have to be statistics out there that'd let us correct for the impact of radically advanced trauma medicine on the murder rate. Surely someone can calculate, say, what is the ratio of gangbangers who get shot but end up getting saved through surgery?
Unfortunately, this statistic is confounded by the shift in calibers for gunshot wounds.
When is this alleged shift supposed to have occurred? 9x19 Parabellum and 0.45 ACP have been the dominant cartridges in police and civilian use since the 1930s, and the two runners up 0.22 Long rifle and the "modern" 12 Gauge Shotgun cartridge both date back to the 1880s.
Yes 5.56 NATO is a relatively new cartridge that only saw wide-spread civilian adoption in the aftermath of the cold-war but that's a rifle cartridge and rifles represent a relatively small percentage of recorded homicides in the US. Approx. 2,700 out of 81,000 if the FBI's crime data explorer is to be believed. Even if we assume that 100% of homicides committed with an unrecorded type were committed with a 5.56 Rifle that's still not much more than the number of people killed with conventional handguns.
While semiautomatics have existed and been common in sporter and military environments before WWII, police and criminal violence overwhelmingly favored the revolver into the 1970s. When they moved away from it, they moved from .38/.357 (and heavily favoring the bigger-but-weaker-.380) as a common round to 9mm and eventually 0.45 ACP, further helped by longer effective barrels (as well as more rounds and faster reloads, at least for anyone not named Miculek).
See here for a breakdown of how vast that difference was.
Common knowledge has the aftermath of 1986 Miami Shootout as the turning point for the law enforcement side of the equation, and that is genuinely where federal officers started moving toward more, bigger, and more powerful ammo. State police varies a lot more. And criminal use is hard to measure... but that ojp.gov report puts Philadelphia deaths as going from rarely (3%) to often (21%) 9mm pistol between 1985 and 1990, and pistols as a category were still less common than the .38/357 revolvers alone.
My understanding is that 0.38 Special is roughly equivalent to 9x19mm Parabellum in terms of terminal ballistics with 9mm ultimately winning out on the basis of being more compact, that that 0.45 and 9mm have killed a roughly equal number of people over the years, but I hadn't considered the 0.357 mag side of things. I may owe @hydroacetylene an apology.
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A podcast I'm listening to quoted a study which basically said you should triple the modern murder rate in order to translate it into the equivalent rate in the 1960s.
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I swear I saw an actual study on the subject a few years, but I can't recall any identifying details that would help me find it again.
Maybe this 2002 study:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124155/
It was posted once in the old subreddit.
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