The 19 children and two teachers killed Tuesday by an 18-year-old at a Texas school are the latest gunshot victims in the United States, where 17,202 people have been shot to death since the start of 2022.
According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which documents violence with firearms, of those 17,202 people, 7,632 lost their lives in murders, by unintentional shooting or self-defense, while 9,570 committed suicide with this class of weapon.
Since the beginning of this year, there have been 213 “mass” shootings and 10 “mass murders.” The Gun Violence Archive defines mass shootings as those with four or more people shot or injured, not counting the perpetrator.
The organization considers as mass murders those with four or more deaths and clarifies that, for statistical purposes, these are seen as a “subgroup” of mass shootings.
Gun Violence Archive, which does not show the final statistics for 2021, points out that 2020 registered a total of 19,411 deaths by firearm, not counting suicides, since the complete numbers are not yet available; compared to 2014, when there were 12,418 deaths and 21,386 suicides.
These data also show a rebound in firearm deaths in 2020, when the pandemic began, compared to 2019, when there were 15,448 if suicides are not taken into account.
A report from the Pew study center, published last February, with figures referring to 2020 -the last year for which there are records- from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), indicates that that year a total of 45,222 people lost their lives in the US from gunshot wounds.
Pew specifies that this number includes murders and suicides with this type of weapon, as well as unintentional deaths, those caused by the action of law enforcement officers and others whose circumstances have not been clarified.
The think tank drew attention to the fact that, although they go more unnoticed, suicides accounted for the majority of deaths with firearms in 2020, 54%, compared to murders, which were 43%, and other types of deaths.
Regarding its evolution, in 2020 a record number of deaths was broken and represented an increase of 14% compared to 2019, 25% compared to 2015 and 43% compared to 2010.
Pew noted that murders with firearms have registered a strong increase in recent years, with 19,384 in 2020, the highest figure since 1968 and above the peak recorded in 1993, with 18,253.
The increase in fatalities due to this type of violence in absolute numbers has also been accompanied by the increase in per capita data: in 2020 there were 13.6 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest rate since the mid-1990s and down from 16.3 per 100,000 people in 1974.
In terms of geographic distribution, the states in the country that had the highest rate of firearm deaths in 2020 were Mississippi (28.6 per 100,000 people), Louisiana (26.3), Wyoming (25.9), Missouri (23.9) and Alabama (23.6).
If the US is compared to other countries, the rate of deaths from violence with firearms is higher, but it is far from some Latin American nations, according to a study published in 2018 by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington (IHME).
This analysis highlights that the rate of deaths from firearms in 2016 in the US was 10.6 per 100,000 people, higher than the rates of countries such as France (2.7), Canada (2.1), Australia (1.0), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6), but lower than El Salvador (39.2), Venezuela (38.7), Guatemala (32.3) and Colombia ( 25.9).
The US ranked 20th in IHME’s list of 195 countries. EFE
