Doctors and Guns Don’t Mix

Back in 2004, the United States had an overall gun violence rate per 100,000 residents of 9.99. According to the CDC, this was the only year since 1981 when the per-100,000K rate for every kind of gun death (intentional, unintentional, etc.) dipped under 10.

In 2020, the most recent year for CDC gun-violence data, the per-100,000K rate was 13.58, an increase of only 36% since 1981. And when you go below the national number to the data from individual states, some states have gun violence rates truly beyond belief. The rate in Alabama is 23.49, in Louisiana it’s 26.14, Mississippi’s rate is 28.57 and Wyoming comes in at 25.85.

Want some comparisons? Try Colombia, where the gun-violence rate is 26.36, Brazil’s rate is 21.93 and Honduras clocks in at 20.15. These countries are considered to be extremely violent thanks to drugs and gangs. None of them have gun-violence rates that we find in certain U.S. states.

The bottom line is that the United States not only experiences a severe threat to community health and safety from guns which is worse than even some of the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ countries, but the problem is getting worse. And by the way, for every American who is shot to death each year, at least six or seven other Americans suffer life-shortening injuries from guns, an annual number that isn’t actually known because the CDC has given…