&gt; The more telling number about gun violence might be “shots fired.” And now, thanks to broader adoption of new technologies, it is getting easier to show just how common gun violence is in America.<p>I happened to be working with a dispatcher in a 9-11 call center on the night the bin Laden raid was announced. Over the course of a couple hours, we fielded hundreds of &quot;shots fired&quot; calls, which mostly turned out to be people lighting off fireworks (sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that&#x27;s more reckless than violent).<p>If &quot;gun violence&quot; had been measured by these reports, the raw stats would suggest that the entire city had spontaneously erupted into a warzone, and then spontaneously returned to normal, all for no reason and without a single injury or death.<p>My point is that the author is advocating collecting statistics in a way that equates gang shootouts and backfiring cars as equal incidents of gun violence. The system is guaranteed to generate lots false positives, which will be used to bolster support for more surveillance and gun control. Not only is it _not_ a better way to measure gun violence, it&#x27;s a proposition so fundamentally flawed that it borders on insanity.