• From 1973 to 1991, 36.6 million people were injured by violent crimes. Of these, 6 million sustained serious injuries. Roughly 2 million people are injured by violent crime every year.(1)
  
  
• In four-fifths of all violent crimes, victims and offenders are of the same race. (2)
  
  
• In 1993, 94 percent of African American murder victims were slain by African American offenders and white offenders killed 84 percent of white murder victims. (3)
  
  
• In 1995, citizens of the US experienced one violent crime every 18 seconds and one murder every 24 minutes. (4)
  
  
• There was one aggravated assault every 29 seconds and one robbery every 54 seconds in 1995. (5)
  
  
• There were an estimated 1.8 million violent crimes reported in the United States in 1995, that's about 1 violent crime for every 134 inhabitants. (6)
  
  
• Of the 22,434 murder offenders in 1995 where supplemental data was available, only 1 percent involved persons over the age of 65 and 10 percent involved a person under the age of 18. (7)
  
  
• In murders where the age of the assailant is known, 68 percent of the offenders are between 17 and 34 years of age. (8)
  
  
• Of the elderly murdered in 1993, 593 (55%) were men and 485 (45%) were women. There were 732 white elderly murder victims in 1993 while 331 African American elderly individuals were murdered.(9)
  
  
• Men are far more likely to commit murder than women are. In murder cases where sex of the assailant is known, males were responsible 91 percent of the time. (10)
  
  
• A firearm was the weapon used in about 7 out of 10 murders in the United States in 1995. (11)
  
  
• Arguments led to 29 percent of the murders committed in 1995, while 17.5 percent occurred during commission of other felonies like robbery. (12)
  
  

(1-2) Bureau of Justice Statistics. The National Crime Victimization Survey, 1973-92. US Department of Justice, 1993.

(3-12) Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States 1995, Uniform Crime Reports. US Department of Justice, 1996.