Charts are keyboard readable: focus a chart, then use the left and right arrow keys to step one reading at a time, hold Shift to step a year (ten readings on a yearly chart), Home and End for the first and last month, Escape to let go. In the timeline, tab to Window Start or Window End and use the arrow keys to move it.
Firearm Deaths
About This Indicator
What Are Firearm Deaths?
Deaths from gunshot wounds per 100,000 people, whatever the intent: suicide, homicide, accident, or a police shooting, counted from death certificates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yearly since 1980.
Why Does It Matter?
It counts every gun death, not only crimes reported to police, so it takes in suicides, which in most years outnumber gun homicides. A suicide attempt with a gun ends in death about nine times in ten, far more often than attempts by most other means.
Can Politics Influence Them?
Gun laws reach them most directly, most of them set by the states, alongside federal rules on who may buy a gun. Suicide prevention, emergency medicine, and policing reach them too.
Key Idea
The line blends two different problems: suicides, highest among older men and in rural places, and homicides, concentrated among young men in cities. The two can move in opposite directions, so a year of falling murders can still be a year of rising gun deaths.
Scored: A Faster Fall or Slower Rise Ranks Better
Source: CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Health, United States 2017, Table 31, for 1980-1998; Deaths: Final Data for 2022, Table 6, for 1999-2022; data.cdc.gov 489q-934x from 2023.
Loading the dataset…