Back in February I published a two-part post looking at gun violence in the United States and how it compares to that in other countries. (See my posts of 21 and 24 February 2018) Now this last week the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has released their statistics for US gun violence in the year 2017 so I’d like to take a chance to look at the new figures.
Not surprisingly the number of Americans killed grew once again to a total of 39,773, up more than a thousand from 38,658 in 2016. Adjusting for age, in 2017 12 Americans out of every 100,000 died by firearm in 2017 the highest rate since 1979, 40 years ago. In fact if you look at the pie chart shown in the image below you’ll see that the United States had the second highest total of gun related deaths of any nation on Earth, behind only Brazil.
Now in a sense comparing total gun deaths isn’t fair since Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela and Guatemala all have smaller populations making their rate of deaths caused by guns much higher. Still, it’s an eerie thought that only six countries account for half of the gun deaths in the entire world, and they’re all in the Western Hemisphere!
Now while I was doing my analysis of gun violence back in February I freely admitted that I was shocked to discover that suicides outnumbered homicides by a wide margin. The data from 2017 continues that trend with 23,854 people killing themselves with a gun as opposed to 15,919 people being killed by someone else. 60% of the total gun deaths are in fact suicides.
If we take a closer look at the demographic breakdown of the suicides in the US, see image below, we quickly discover another shocking fact. The number of suicides among white men, 18,759 is more than three times the number, 5095, for all other demographic groups combined, 79% of the total. Now it is true that white men are a large demographic group here in the US making up 30% of the entire population but that still means that they are killing themselves at almost nine times the rate of the rest of the American population.
Now taking a look at the breakdown of the homicides, see image below, we find another shocker. Here it is black men who are by far the largest number of victims. Last year 7,661 black men were gunned down compared to 8,258 for all other groups combined, 48% of the total number. In 2017 a black male was approximately six times more likely to be murdered than someone from another demographic group.
Statistics like these cry out for explanation, demand that somebody do something. The obvious fact that our horribly high rates of suicide and murder are so concentrated in only two demographic groups means that there are social problems unique to those groups. Problems that, if they are found and studied can be reduced if not eliminated entirely. The suicide rate in particular is obviously a mental health issue that begs for a non-political solution.
At the present time however federal agencies like the CDC are legally being prevented from studying gun violence by lawmakers. These so-called leaders are supported by the gun industry and therefore refuse to even consider any sensible approach to reducing gun violence.
First and foremost we need to allow our nation’s best scientific minds to study the problem of gun violence in this country. Only then will we have any chance of giving the people of the United States freedom from gun violence.