Firearm-related deaths increased a lot. As the article mentions, that is a big category that encompasses suicide, homicide, accidents, etc. Clicking through to a supplementary pdf provides a figure that breaks firearm deaths down by subcategory, sex, and race.
Came here to point this out. Unfortunately everything is politics. As another commenter mentioned this includes a lot of gang stuff and suicide when someone is old enough to purchase a gun.
I’ll update this comment when I find the source but I believe if you use the definition of minors that we usually use elsewhere (under 18) firearms are not the leading cause of death.
I'll add some nuance here and its possibly a separate debate on its significance but according to that data, total firearm deaths surpass vehicle deaths but if you look at the split between homicide suicide its like 60-40 homicide-suicide. We would be talking about motor vehicle deaths a lot differently if half that number were kids stealing their parents keys to run into a wall at 100mph.
Whats interesting is that the gun deaths were higher in 2016 than they are now (roughly 2900). What this suggests is that firearms becoming the leading cause of deaths is not because of a rise in firearm deaths but because the number of vehicle deaths have been dropping off as well - which should be evident based on how little people drove over the last few years.
Edit: also alarming that the per capita rate is increasing as overall gun deaths are still on the decline. That can't be good (if our youth population is declining that rapidly).
I'm surprised that by expanding like that it changes the stats that much - are gang members waiting for someone to turn 18th birthday before commencing in gang related murder?
No, but the window of gang-related violence doesn't really start until, say, 14†. Or some other age >> infancy.
So it looks like a tiny change in range when you're going from 0-17 to 0-19, but the peak of the curve already lies near the end of those ranges, so the effect is similar to comparing the range of 14-17 vs. 14-19.
† I chose this somewhat arbitrarily, but the idea is the same. The "natural" bottom of the range isn't 0, it's older.
That's true, I imagine there aren't a lot of 6 year olds doing drive-bys, but given the other major cause of death is motor vehicle accidents I'd expect that too to rise at the same age as inexperienced drivers gain independence behind the wheel for the first time.
> are gang members waiting for someone to turn 18th birthday before commencing in gang related murder?
I wonder how many "undocumented" gang members would claim to be minors to get tried as a child instead of an adult. Remember the fastest 14 years old in Sweden? [0]
So... you gonna update your beliefs in light of the changing landscape? We have the source; you probably heard it when it was true, but things have gotten worse. Or are you just going to seek alternative ways of supporting your pre-existing beliefs?
Take what you can get reliably, use it as a sample and try and extrapolate out making adjustments if the sample population differs from the overall population.
> making adjustments if the sample population differs from the overall population.
This feels like a step you can't just handwave away as step three of three. To quote the meme, it's a bit of a "draw the rest of the fucking owl" situation.
Extrapolation is hard, and there are very good reasons not to do it willy nilly. Where it is standardised in other fields, it's usually because researchers have already figured out good ways to extrapolate the data and proven the the extrapolation appears to be valid (and even then, usually only within limited bounds).
Depends on which area of the country that you are in but along the southern border a lot of gangs bring in guns.
Then there is the fact that our incompetent government does things like Operation Fast and Furious (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal) and, no, the ATF using private businesses to funnel guns into the hands of people who would not otherwise be able to acquire them is not the same as firearms that were once legal.
When you see literal shoot outs in the streets between the Sinaloa cartel and the Mexican armed forces, you don't honestly think the cartel members drove to AZ and walked into a Cabela's, do you?
Just like drugs, humans, etc, guns are also trafficked. The vast majority of gun homicides are done with handguns and largely gang related. Not all of those guns weren't at one point legal guns in the US - where the gang member either stole them from a law abiding citizen or walked into a gun store. All handguns in the US require background checks and you have to be 21 years old to buy.
I think the problem is multi-faceted:
- some guns were legally acquired in the US then stolen
- the government has done gun running operations from the US into Mexico and then some of the guns have ended up being used in crimes back in the US
- some gun running does acquire guns outside of the US and brings them in
The thing I am objecting to is the notion that if an illegally used gun was used in a crime it must have once been a legally possessed gun, and (the implicit policy prescription) that the way to curb illegal gun possession is by limiting legal gun possession. While that last part probably tracks, because of my ideological beliefs, I'd rather we exhaust all other options before limiting legal gun ownership. And even then, again because ideology/convictions, curbing legal gun ownership is probably not a thought I'd entertain at the ballot box.
Or actually enforcing laws on the book to prevent legal guns to becoming illegal guns. Saw this a lot growing up in the south. Jimbo is gonna get charged with some crime that will take away his ability to own a gun, so Jimbo sells/transfers the ownership of the gun to his brother/best friend bob. Bob now legally owns that/those guns, but those guns never actually end up in Bob's ownership. 5 years later, Jimbo still has the guns in his closet.
It got a cocked eyebrow from me when I saw the range too, "children and adolescents" makes me think "up to 15-16". I wonder if there's a breakdown by age range?
Because they combine children and adolescents (1-19). In their 2018 publication [0], you can see they actually do distinguish between younger children (1-4), older children (5-9), and adolescents (10-19). Your complaint was that 19 is an arbitrary cutoff, or even in bad faith, but it’s actually a common established definition in health contexts.
My guess is that 19 is when a cohort is 100% out of school. If you cut off at 18 you'd miss many highschool seniors, and therefore lots of school shooting deaths.
That would require an incredible slant towards exclusively 18-year-olds being killed in school shootings, and an exceptional overestimation of just how many school shooting deaths there are per capita for it to make that kind of difference.
If you look at their 2018 publication [0], they actually do that, distinguishing between younger children (1-4), older children (5-9), and adolescents (10-19).
So, the news here is that gun deaths are now the leading cause of death for teens (ages 13-19), but for kids 1-12, cars remain the leading cause of death in the US.
> Through age 12, more than 500 more U.S. kids died in vehicle crashes in 2020 than were killed with firearms. But the numbers flip beginning with age 13, and emphatically. For ages 13 through 19, firearms killed more than 1,000 more teens than did traffic crashes.
Historically, car crashes are the leading cause of death for both groups combined.
Firearms, motor vehicles, and overdose all jumped large % amounts from 2019 to 2020. One has to wonder how much of this is mental-health related, given that 2020 had a, uh, significant impact on many people's mental health.
Suicide rates in teens has been trending upward long before COVID. Look at the rates over time with the release of the smartphone and popularization of social media.
In 2013 motor vehicle crashes and firearm-related injuries both trended upwards, and seemed to track each other; in 2019 firearm-related injuries and drug overdoses both increased sharply. Something happened in those two years. I wonder what.
The pandemic changed a lot of things, more and more people purchased guns for protection, and fentanyl drug abuse is a massive issue right now and has been for years.
Starting around 2019 there was a huge increase in accidental fentanyl poisonings due to Mexican drug cartels manufacturing counterfeit prescription opioid pills.
I figured firearms and ODing would be on the rise, but suffocation surprised me. It's still low, but also one of the few that's trending upward. What could be the cause of that?
> Is there any info on how many of them were school shootings? how many of them were gang violence related death?
If by school shootings you mean the type of random killings that make the news, then that data is published as a part of the FBI active shooter datasets every year (lagging by a few years now).
For numerical context, according to the NHTSA study from last decade, >25 kids die every year just commuting to school (vehicle accident, or hit by vehicle walking to school, etc).
in the ghetto cities nearby, only a small number of murders and overall firearm incidents are solved. I cannot imagine that they are accurately captured at the national scale. On the 4th of July night or New Years night, literally hundreds of firearms go off for hours in crowded, urban areas.. completely illegal.
Solving a murder and determining whether a murder was committed with a rifle are two completely different things; you don't need to know who the culprit was to determine how they did it. There is no reason to believe that murders committed with rifles go unsolved more frequently than those committed with handguns.
Does it help if you consider how many causes of death we've invented away from? People don't die from a host of diseases because we have vaccines now, a whole host of things improved in the medical side of things so that people don't die in childbirth, inventions in agriculture allow people to starve an awful lot less than they used to, etc.
Gun advocates tend to add insult to injury by vilifying gun violence victims and their families. I suppose its because those victims manifest the inconvenient truth that the cost of America's gun obsession is paid with the blood of innocents.
So if you're a gun owner, please be sure to thank those victims and donate to their families. They died so that you can own your loud shiny tools of effortless assassination.
Highly likely a lot of it is simply older cars without safety features we consider basic these days (like side air bags) being phased out. Very few people driving cars from the 80s or earlier these days.
You can probably thank Ralph Nader for a lot of it, honestly.
Also encompasses the "cash for clunkers" program and period of low interest rates, both of which accelerated the retirement of older cars for newer (and generally, safer) cars
I know about unsafe at any speed. Correlation is not causation. Trends don't mean monotonically decreasing. Was there also a book written in 1931 and in 1945?
lol I see, the man who crusaded for vehicle safety and helped force a bunch of legislation mandating vehicle safety regulations has nothing to do with vehicles becoming safer following said regulations.
Seems pretty clear you just don't want to admit you're in the wrong here, so I think we're done.
Yet in a lot of countries they don't anymore. Here mostly due to pedestrian and cyclist deaths being counted as motor vehicle deaths due to increasing car size and more km driven per capita.
A lot of improvements in vehicle safety were made between 1990ish and 2005ish. Around 2004-14 period the older cars that teenagers drive would have started being models with airbags and ABS. Neither of these have much impact on fatalities among "average drivers" but young driver's propensity to crash into things at very high speed and propensity to load more people than seat-belts into vehicles plays right into the use cases where these technologies will save the most lives. Cars from the mid '00s on up will also have much stiffer cabins because of a bunch of rollover and side impact rule changes that took effect around then.
Rate of fatal car accidents in US is about twice as that in Germany and Germans have autobahn with no speed limits drinking beer and then driving is part of their culture.
Car were safer and safer, ABS and stuff helped, Also the whole world started doing crash tests to help protect the drivers and passengers.
Note that the trend continued past 2014 in Europe (stabilizing now). Two differences:
- Less SUVs/light truck on the road in Europe (it's changing)
- crash tests in Europe test small cars against SUVs, SUVs against trucks... All different combinations. If your utility vehicle / SUV doesn't perform well on those crash tests, you can't sell it (hence no F-150).
As others have pointed out, the choice of the age range has a significant impact on the conclusions one is able to draw. In particular, this paper defines "Children and Adolescents" as 1 to 19 years old, which captures a lot of firearms related deaths due to gang violence.
Unfortunately, politics and culture war are infused in everything. But, if you want to be informed so that you can make better, persuasive arguments, I suggest looking at the CDC Child Health data here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/child-health.htm
TLDR: non-accidental deaths are weighted heavily towards 15-19 year olds, and due to that cohort's fraction of the 1-19 year population, when 15-19 year olds are lumped together with 1-14 yos, it allows someone to present data that homicides are the leading cause of death for 1 to 19 year olds. The further refinement from homicides -> firearms is presumably disambiguated in the referenced paper.
While the authors are obviously free to frame the data and discussion however they please, this strikes me as a paper designed to serve a policy position or perhaps guide political action more so than an even handed look at childhood deaths. Add to it the emotional impact that we're talking about children here, and I find it verging into the emotionally manipulative.
I don’t think there should be wars in general. I think the old adage of “if you make guns illegal only criminals would have guns” is vacuously true and entirely the point. You can then arrest them for owning a gun rather than waiting for them to commit a crime with that gun.
Practically speaking I think this is unlikely to be possible in the US. Banning guns would be a dead letter law. Guns are so widely owned and pervasive it would be impossible to implement. I expect law enforcement won’t want to get involved either due to how dangerous disarming an entire populace would be.
There are plenty of resources out there for reactivating spent 9x19mm casings (Project ButWhatAbout) with supplies legally available in Western Europe, it's wishful thinking that just banning ammo would pan out. The genie's kind of out of the bottle.
if selling your gun was illegal, sure, you could still sell it. but would you choose to sell it to a loner, mentally unstable 18 year old knowing you'd be in serious trouble if that gun were used in a crime and they named you as the source of the gun? If the kid isn't killed in the mass shooting, and he says "I got the gun from..." seems not worth the risk
You know, I could've sworn the post I was responding to said "of ammo", hence why I spoke about building ammo and not guns.
But the conclusion remains the same in that making a working firearm at home isn't difficult, and there exist a plethora of designs like the FGC-9 family that can be assembled from easy-to-acquire parts, no manufacturer needed.
If it’s illegal then it’ll just be done the same way as making an illegal purchase is now, probably by asking around until you find someone that “knows a guy”. Either that or you’d just steal one.
And how effective do you think it will be to ban guns in cities and doesn’t that go back to my point of giving police yet another reason to harass minorities unequally?
Urban prosecutors routinely drop gun charges instead of prosecuting them. Existing gun laws are largely unenforced, particularly in cities with democratic prosecutors.
Except it’s not. Well regulated militias are about the states ability to muster a militia. Militias have scopes and scales associated with them, such as ages and dispositions. For instance in Washington state, “Idiots, lunatics, paupers and vagabonds, habitual drunkards and persons convicted of infamous crimes” and people younger than 18 and older than 45 years old, as well as government officials and judiciary and legislature, are not eligible for the militia, organized or unorganized. So, why are they eligible for consideration under the second amendment?
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMc2201761/suppl_fi...