Statistics and causes Year 2000
The definitive source for US injury death statistics is the Centers For Disease Control National Center for Injury Prevention & Control website which provides statistics on all deaths by injury, not just gun deaths. To get the number of gun deaths for a year just set the Cause of Injury to Firearm. If you only want to know the number of child gun deaths per year then choose the custom age range and input 0 years ( <1 ) as the lowest age and 17 years as the top age. Be sure to select "No Age-Adjusting Requested" if you are only interested in a particular age group.
Note that the CDC child gun death figures are typically half of the figures that the gun control lobby publishes. The difference is in the definition of a child. The gun control lobby counts young adults that are 18 or 19 years old as children, but they do not count 20 year olds as children. You can choose from one of two possible reasons, depending on your level of cynicism: 1. The standard CDC age groups used to go from 0-19, 20-39, etc and the gun control lobby couldn't figure out how to select a custom age group. 2. Counting 18 and 19 year olds as children doubles the number of so-called child gun deaths, and more child gun deaths means more support for gun control.
In 1999 there were 1776 gun deaths in the 0 through 17 age group and 3385 gun deaths in the 0 through 19 age group. By subtraction we find that there were a whopping 1609 gun deaths in just the 18 through 19 age group. Historically the 18 through 24 age group is the highest crime-committing group. At age 18 part-time drug dealers leave school and become full-time drug dealers. Despite the propaganda from the gun control lobby, criminals in general and drug dealers in particular are the group of so-called children most likely to be shot by their fellow criminals. You can verify this by reading the local gun death news stories in any city newspaper. School shootings are so rare that every one gets national television coverage, but drug dealers are shot so often that they are barely mentioned in their local newspaper.
Older people's gun deaths are most likely to be suicides. Suicides typically make up 56.5% of all gun deaths according to the Bureau Of Justice Statistics. In fact, drugs and suicides account for more than 2 out of every 3 gun deaths in the USA.
The best way to prevent gun deaths is to treat depression and other mental illness, teach children not to sell or use illegal drugs, treat drug addiction, and have police concentrate on enforcing drug laws. However, the gun control lobby says that we should spend billions of dollars on gun registration and gun licensing instead of using the money to treat depression and combat drugs.
The accidental gun death rate has been falling since 1930 and US accidental gun deaths per year were down to 824 by 1999 according to the CDC. Note that it is extremely easy to prevent accidental gun deaths
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In 2005 (the most recent year for which data is available), there were 30,694 gun deaths in the U.S:
* 12,352 homicides (40% of all U.S gun deaths),
* 17,002 suicides (55% of all U.S gun deaths),
* 789 unintentional shootings, 330 from legal intervention and 221 from undetermined intent (5% of all U.S gun deaths combined). Wild West Syndrome I guess..... :roll:
Suicide is still the leading cause of firearm death in the U.S., representing 55% of total 2005 gun deaths nationwide. In 2005, the U.S. firearm suicide total was 17,002, a 1.5% INCREASE from 2004 suicide deaths. Most suicides in the U.S. are committed with firearms.
-Numbers obtained from CDC National Center for Health Statistics mortality report online, 2008.
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Another Fact:
Overall, 42,636 people died in car crashes in the U.S. in 2003.
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The non-story of 2006 was also the non-story of 2005. It is a non-story every year going back decades.
Yet the number of people who die in car crashes in North America is staggering, even if it is absent from the agenda of most public officials and largely ignored by the public.
When all is said and done and the ball begins to drop on New Year's Eve, 44,000 people, give or take several hundred, will have died in auto accidents in the United States this year.
In Canada, about 2,500 die in road fatalities.
For perspective, consider that:
# At the 2006 casualty rate of 800 soldiers a year, the United States would have to be in Iraq for more than 50 years to equal just one year of automobile deaths back home.
# In any five-year period, the total number of traffic deaths in the United States equals or exceeds the number of people who died in the horrific South Asian tsunami in December 2004.
U.S. traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of two tsunamis every 10 years.
# The National Safety Council says your chance of dying in an auto crash is one in 84 over your lifetime. But your chances of winning the Mega Millions lottery are just one in 175 million.
# If you laid out side by side 8-by-10 photos of all those killed in crashes this year, the pictures would stretch more than eight kilometres.
# If you made a yearbook containing the photos of those killed this year, putting 12 photos on each page, it would have 3,500 pages.
If you limited your traffic-death yearbook to a mere 400 pages, you'd either have to squeeze more than 100 photos onto each page or issue an eight-volume set.
Automobile deaths are the leading cause of death for children, for teenagers and, in fact, for all people from age 3 to 33.
:lol:
