Shooting Rekindles Issues of Gun Rights and Restrictions

[HungLikeJesus]

While reading this thread I began to wonder about where firearms fell in the list of leading causes of death in the US. This table compares causes in 1990 and 2000: http://www.csdp.org/research/1238.pdf (page 3)

Actual Cause No. (%) in 1990* No. (%) in 2000
Tobacco 400 000 (19) 435 000 (18.1)
Poor diet and physical inactivity 300 000 (14) 400 000 (16.6)
Alcohol consumption 100 000 (5) 85 000 (3.5)
Microbial agents 90 000 (4) 75 000 (3.1)
Toxic agents 60 000 (3) 55 000 (2.3)
Motor vehicle 25 000 (1) 43 000 (1.8)
Firearms 35 000 (2) 29 000 (1.2)
Sexual behavior 30 000 (1) 20 000 (0.8)
Illicit drug use 20 000 (<1) 17 000 (0.7)
Total 1 060 000 (50) 1 159 000 (48.2)
*Data are from McGinnis and Foege.1 The percentages are for all deaths.

Sorry about the format, I couldn't figure out how to make the table appear correctly. The first column is cause, the second column is number of deaths from that cause in 1990 then the (percentage), followed by the same information in 2000.

Note that firearms deaths decreased by almost 20% in that time, while motor vehicle deaths increased by over 70%, despite advances in vehicle design and safety (ABS, air bags, traction control, etc.).

This site has leading cause of death data broken down by age group: http://www.the-eggman.com/writings/death_stats.html and includes a table of accidental deaths.

The point of all this is just to try to get some perspective on firearm deaths in the US, relative to all other causes. Note that tobacco and poor diet contribute about 30 times more to the death rate than do firearms. In terms of accidental deaths, firearms rank fairly low, but in terms of intentional deaths (of which I have not seen statistics) I would assume they would rank fairly high.

Edit: The text of the first paper indicates that "In 2000, 16586 deaths were due to intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms (ICD-10 codes X72-X74). Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms (ICD-10 codes X93-X95) resulted in 10801 deaths. Unintentional discharge of firearms (ICD-10 codes W32-W34) resulted in 776 deaths, while discharge of firearms, undetermined intent (ICD-10 codes Y22-Y24), resulted in 230 deaths. The remaining 270 deaths were due to legal intervention (ICD-10 code Y35)."