The numbers behind the ‘public health crisis’ of gun violence

But gun violence in the United States is not simply about the mass shootings that provoke so much attention and fear. Rather, it is largely about people using firearms to take their own lives, with wide variations across the country.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses death certificates to collect data on causes of death in the United States. That includes both an overall count of gun-related deaths each year as well as different types of deaths from different types of firearms. The most recent full year of CDC data is 2022; CDC data from the past three years shows the increase in gun deaths that Murthy noted in making his statement.

Most of those deaths, even in 2022, were the result of people taking their own lives. In 2020 and 2021, the percentage of gun deaths that were the result of suicide was lower than in any year since 1999, according to CDC data. The percentage that were homicides was higher. However, in 2022 the percentage of firearm deaths attributed to suicide increased.

The rate of gun deaths relative to state populations varies. DC and Montana, for example, have many gun deaths relative to their population. New Jersey and California have relatively few.

DC also has many more deaths attributed to assaults, i.e. murders. In states like Utah, most deaths are attributed to suicide. In other states, including much of the South, the number of homicides is much higher.

However, the recent rise in gun deaths pales in comparison to the rise in overdose deaths. That increase is attributed to rising fentanyl deaths, but overdose deaths had been rising for some time before fentanyl came along a few years ago.

Overdose deaths from opioids (including the synthetic opioid fentanyl) were declared a public health emergency in 2017. That year, the CDC recorded three overdose deaths for every two firearm deaths in the United States, compared to one ratio of 1 to 1 six years earlier. . In 2022, there were two opioid deaths for every firearm death.

Preliminary 2023 data released by the CDC indicates that the number of gun deaths in the United States did not increase that year, but instead fell 5 percent. That would be a rate of decline greater than the 3 percent drop in overdose deaths recorded during the same period.

There are still tens of thousands of gun deaths a year. And, of course, there is still a political motivation to focus the country’s attention on those deaths.