Mel Evans / AP

Officers from the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office work at a two-day gun buyback event in Trenton, N.J., on Jan. 26. People were allowed to drop off weapons with no questions asked.

On average, about 86 people a day are killed by firearms in America, or 31,672 per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control tally for 2010, the latest year available.

That year, the CDC counted 19,392 gun deaths by suicide, 11,078 homicides with firearms, 606 deaths by accidental shootings and 596 with other or undetermined cause. (Read the full report.)

A child aged 5 through 14 in America is about 13 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than children in Japan, Italy or other industrial countries, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. (Watch the Harvard forum on gun violence.)

Larry W. Smith / EPA

Guns lie in a chair at the First Presbyterian Church parking garage in Dallas during a gun buyback program on Jan. 19, 2013. Across the street, gun-rights advocates were offering to auction off guns at higher prices.

Guns are used in about seven out of 10 murders in the U.S., according to FBI statistics. The weapons of choice are guns, 68 percent; knives, 13 percent; fists or feet, 6 percent; other, 6 percent; and unknown, 7 percent. (See other statistics in a chart from The Dallas Morning News.)

The crime rate has been declining steadily for firearm crimes. In 1993 and 1994, for example, the rate was above seven firearm crimes for every 1,000 people age 12 or older. It has fallen pretty consistently to 1.8 in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics have been tallied, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Even in Chicago, which has a strict gun control law and received a lot of publicity in recent months for a spike in homicides, the number of killings has declined sharply over the past 20 years. The number was consistently above 800 in the early 1990s, but fell to the 700s, to the 600s in the early 2000s, and near 500 or below for every year since 2004, according to a report by the Chicago Police Department.

There is considerable disagreement among researchers, however, on whether the high-rate of U.S. gun ownership has a direct correlation to violent crimes and, if so, what it's impact might be. Here's a recent analysis by FactCheck.org that does a good job covering that terrain.

Related story

A look at some nations' gun ownership rates.

Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend

Thirty-three percent of American households have a gun. That rate varies from Georgia's 41 percent down to New Jersey's 11 percent, according to a 2002 federal survey.

Here are some civilian firearm ownership percentages for selected countries, according to The Small Arms Survey: Germany, 30 per 100 residents; Iceland, 30; Austria, 30; Canada, 31; Iraq, 34; Saudi Arabia, 35; Switzerland, 46; Yemen, 55; United States, 89.

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Mario Tama / Getty Images

Police officers were among those injured during a confrontation with a gunman outside the Empire State Building in New York in August.

The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty fell sharply in 2012, the first full year that two Obama administration police safety programs were in effect, according to preliminary figures released Thursday.

With four days left in the year, 127 federal, state and local officers have died on the job so far, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reported — 23 percent fewer than the 165 who were killed last year.

The nonprofit organization keeps a comprehensive tally of all law enforcement officers who die in the line of duty, honoring them each year at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington.

Craig W. Floyd, the organization's chief executive, credited close cooperation among federal, state and local authorities in bringing a new focus on officer safety. The decline follows two years of what he called "alarming" increases.

"The law enforcement community has banded together with laser-like focus on peace officer safety," Floyd said in a statement.

The decline also comes during the first full year under two Obama administration police safety programs, one run by the Justice Department and one by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The Law Enforcement Safety Initiative, which Attorney General Eric Holder rolled out in March 2011 after meeting with police chiefs from major U.S. cities, created an Officer Safety and Wellness unit at the Justice Department, boosted training and technical assistance for local officers and invested $25 million in 96,000 bullet-resistant vests that were distributed this year among more than 4,000 local agencies.

Read the full report (.pdf)

Firearms-related deaths fell to 49 this year, the memorial fund reported — down a third from 72 last year and even below the 10-year average of 57 from 2001 to 2010.

Traffic-related incidents remained the biggest hazard, however, as they have been nearly every year since the late 1990s. But they, too, fell significantly, from 60 last year to 50 this year.

The NHTSA and the memorial fund launched their own Officer Safety Initiative in August 2011, funding research and public information campaigns around police safety in traffic-related incidents. 

A breakdown for 2012 wasn't reported, but the campaign noted that 42 percent of officers killed in auto crashes over the last 30 years weren't wearing safety belts. It said nearly all those deaths were preventable.

Other targets of the initiative include:

• Reducing distracted driving — mainly officers' use of their cellphones instead of their radios, a practice many agencies prohibit that — which the fund said was responsible for about a quarter of all police traffic deaths.
• Encouraging agencies to invest in high-visibility apparel so officers are easier to see during traffic stops at night.

Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com

Shootings and traffic incidents were by far the leading hazards. Third was work-related illnesses, at 14, many of them heart attacks.

Overall, the statistics indicate that, despite its dangerous image, police work isn't among the most hazardous jobs in the U.S. The death totals work out to about 1.56 per every 100,000 sworn federal, state and local officers across the country — less than half the rate of 3.5 per 100,000 for U.S. workers in all jobs in 2011, the last year for which complete figures were available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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