As 2020 came to a close, it was deemed “the deadliest year in U.S. history,” with early data showing that total deaths climbed above 3 million for the first time.
Understandably, the COVID-19 pandemic captured most headlines for why that year was particularly deadly — more than 300,000 deaths in the United States occurred as a result.
Since that time, COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. surpassed 1 million people from the start of the pandemic to current 2022 figures today.
As COVID-19 persists there has been another public health threat that has stood out as an enduring crisis that’s only worsened since 2020: gun violence.
While a series of high-profile mass shootings dominated headlines, less-highlighted and smaller scale incidents of gun violence nationwide have continued to make this a central health threat endemic to American daily life.
Healthline spoke with experts about the pressing threat of gun violence in this country, how it’s a public health concern, and ways to raise awareness in order to enact needed change.
Gun violence — a serious problem in America
Gun violence in and of itself certainly isn’t a phenomenon endemic solely to the U.S., but the statistics are worrying when compared to the rest of the world.
Globally, an estimated 2,000 people are injured and 500 die each day, while there were a total of 1.4 million deaths tied to firearms between 2012 and 2016, according to Amnesty International.
What about domestically?
In the United States, there are more than 100 gun deaths each day and about 38,000 each year, according to Giffords, the gun control advocacy and research organization co-founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords.
A new 2022 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions takes a deep dive analyzing firearm fatality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes from 2020 and is the most recent currently available.
Johns Hopkins’s analysis revealed that overall 2020 firearm-related deaths totaled 45,222 — an increase of 15 percent from the previous year.
This is the highest reported by the CDC since it started recording these firearm statistics in 1968.
To put that number in perspective, 124 people on average died from gun violence each day. Additionally, firearm homicides saw a 35 percent increase in 2020, which means an increase of 5,000 more of these homicides compared to 2019, according to a Johns Hopkins press release.
A 2022 analysis of the same CDC data published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that gun violence also surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death among American youth in 2020. The researchers found an increase of 29.5 percent in gun-related deaths among U.S children and adolescents up to the age of 19 from 2019 to 2020.
This was “more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population,” reads the paper.
Given that issues of mortality, lingering health impacts of a gunshot wound, and the psychological impact a gun death or injury can have on a household or community at large, why isn’t this discussed as a public health crisis on par with the current pandemic impacting our lives nationwide?
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