Guns Have Overtaken Cars as Leading Cause of Traumatic Deaths in the U.S.

In 2018, more people died from bullets than in car crashes, a new study found.

ByEd Cara
Today 6:30PM

Gun-related fatalities have surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of deaths from physical trauma, according to new research. In recent years, more lives—and years of life—were lost to firearms than to motor vehicles. The majority of these deaths involved suicide, particularly among older white men, but Black Americans were more likely to die from gun-related homicide.

Traumatic injuries are thought to be the leading cause of death among Americans ages 46 and younger, and motor vehicle fatalities have long been considered the top culprit. But over the past decade, there has been a noticeable increase in firearm deaths, which made the researchers behind this new study wonder if that distinction was still true. To find out, they sifted through the latest available mortality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 through 2018.

For most of this time period, yearly car deaths continued to outnumber firearm deaths. But by 2018, guns were on top. That year, nearly 39,000 Americans were killed by guns, while around 37,000 died in a motor vehicle crash.

The researchers also attempted to calculate the years of potential life lost, which subtracts the age when someone dies from their expected mortality, in this case age 80. In 2017, the team calculated that 1.44 million years of life were lost to firearms, compared with 1.37 million years lost to cars, and the gap grew even larger the next year. The team’s findings were published Tuesday in Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open.

More:
https://gizmodo.com/guns-have-overtaken-cars-as-leading-cause-of-traumatic-1848576258