Last Wednesday, there was a note posted atop Slate’s interactive gun-death tracker, which we quote at the end of each post: As time goes on, our count gets further and further away from the likely actual number of gun deaths in America—because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides, which are very rarely reported. Part of the purpose of this interactive is to point out how difficult it is to get accurate real-time numbers on this issue. Indeed, according to the Center for Disease Control’s WISQARS database, which catalogs causes of fatal injury as listed on death certificates, 61 percent of firearm deaths in 2010, the last year for which such information was available, were suicides. So far this year, by scanning available news sources, Slate and @GunDeaths have pegged firearm deaths at 5,255, which would put us on track for about 11,000 by the end of the year. But according to WISQARS, 31,672 people were killed by guns in 2010, meaning Slate records less than half of the country’s gun deaths. 20,000 suicide victims will never make the news. Something else: 306,946 people were killed and 682,076 were wounded by guns from 2001 to 2010—meaning that nearly a million people in the United States were injured or killed by gun violence in the last decade. Here is today’s report. —Jennifer Mascia
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 17:29:15 +0000
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