White men defined as non-Hispanic or Latinx white.Īnglemyer, Horvath, and Rutherford, “The Accessibility of Firearms and Risk for Suicide and Homicide Victimization Among Household Members: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Ann. A yearly average rate was developed using five years of the most recent available data: 2016 to 2020. 9 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, WONDER Online Database, Underlying Cause of Death. White men represent 73 percent of firearm suicide victims in America.8 April Opoliner et al., “Explaining Geographic Patterns of Suicide in the US: The Role of Firearms and Antidepressants,” Injury Epidemiology 1, no. Gun suicides are concentrated in states with high rates of gun ownership. 7 Andrew Anglemyer, Tara Horvath, and George Rutherford, “The Accessibility of Firearms and Risk for Suicide and Homicide Victimization Among Household Members,” Annals of Internal Medicine 160, no. Access to a gun triples the risk of death by suicide.6 Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates in the US Compared to Those of the Other High-Income Countries, 2015,” Preventive Medicine 123 (June 2019): 20–26. The US gun suicide rate is 10 times that of other high-income countries. 5 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, WONDER Online Database, Underlying Cause of Death. When it comes to gun violence in America, 6 out of every 10 gun deaths are suicides.Everytown analysis also excludes murder suicides and police who were off-duty at time of shooting. Dataset includes only killings in the process of arrests, excluding medical emergencies, overdoses, deaths ruled or probable suicide. Mapping Police Violence dataset is compiled from Fatal Encounters,, US Police Shootings Database, and Fatal Force.
4 Everytown analysis of 2013 to 2019 Mapping Police Violence (accessed June 4, 2020). Mapping Police Violence’s database is widely cited and estimates that over 1,000 people are fatally shot by police in an average year-nearly twice as many as recorded by the CDC. 7 (July 1, 2003): 1117–21, Catherine Barber et al., “Homicides by Police: Comparing Counts From the National Violent Death Reporting System, Vital Statistics, and Supplementary Homicide Reports,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 3 Colin Loftin et al., “Underreporting of Justifiable Homicides Committed by Police Officers in the United States, 1976–1998,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. Note: Research indicates that shootings by police are undercounted in CDC datasets, as incidents are often misclassified as homicides. Source: CDC, WONDER, Underlying Cause of Death, 2016–2020. Intent category averages may not total to yearly average due to rounding. Multiple media sources and nonprofit groups have tracked shootings by police, but no reliable public database captures unintentional shootings. This underreporting is largely due to missing information on death certificates, which may result in misclassification of intent. While it is broadly considered to be the most comprehensive firearm fatal injury source, two of the intent categories-legal intervention (e.g., shootings by police) and unintentional deaths-are estimated to be greatly underreported. A yearly average was developed using five years of the most recent available data: 2016 to 2020.
Filling these gaps is necessary to truly understand the full impact of gun violence in America.Īverage Deaths per Year 2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, WONDER Online Database, Underlying Cause of Death. Still, significant data gaps remain-a result of underfunded, incomplete data collection at the state and federal levels. In order to illustrate the magnitude of everyday gun violence Everytown has gathered the most comprehensive, publicly available data. The effects of gun violence in America extend far beyond these casualties-gun violence shapes the lives of millions of Americans who witness it, know someone who was shot, or live in fear of the next shooting. Everytown For Gun Safety Support Fund, “A More Complete Picture: The Contours of Gun Injury in the United States,” December 4, 2020. 1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, WONDER Online Database, Underlying Cause of Death.
Every day, more than 110 Americans are killed with guns and more than 200 are shot and wounded.