DEATHS BY CAR ACCIDENTS AND DRUG OVERDOSES FAR OUTNUMBER GUN DEAHTS

President Obama, VP Joe Biden, Senators Feinstein and Schumer, NY Gov. Cuomo, Maryland Gov. O’Malley, NY Mayor Bloomberg and other strident gun control advocates, together with a sensationalizing media, are feeding off of tragic mass shootings like the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre to whittle away the Second Amendment. What they do not want to acknowledge is that far more people are killed by car accidents and drug overdoses than those killed by gunfire.

AS CAUSES OF DEATH, GUN VIOLENCE IS OVERBLOWN
While there are still too many homicides and suicides involving firearms, car accidents and drug overdoses take more lives

By Bill King

Houston Chronicle
May 12, 2013

Just as the Boston bombing refocused the nation's attention on terrorism, the recent flurry of shootings by deranged gunmen, and particularly the horrific slaughter of school children in Connecticut late last year, has brought about a furious debate over the role of guns in our society. For the past several weeks, newscasts have been dominated by stories on terrorism and gun violence.

Last week, we looked at actual statistics on terrorism that suggest it is not the overwhelming problem we sometimes believe it to be. But what about gun violence? Does the problem justify this level of national attention?

By comparison, gun violence is a much more pervasive and serious problem than terrorism. In recent years, gunfire has killed a little more than 30,000 Americans annually. If all gun-related deaths were lumped together, it would be the third-leading cause of death by injury in the U.S. after car accidents and accidental poisonings (which includes drug overdose) according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

However, the CDC breaks down each cause of death based on whether it was intentional, self-inflicted or accidental. About 60 percent of the gun-related deaths are the result of suicide. Fewer than 3 percent are caused by accidents and the rest are homicides. Under the CDC's categorization, suicide by firearm is the fourth-leading cause of death by injury in the U.S., behind car accidents, accidental poisoning and accidental falls. Homicide by firearm is the fifth-leading cause, registering about 11,000 deaths annually.

So one of the first questions we need to ask ourselves is whether the prevalence of guns in our society increases the suicide rate. The question is difficult to answer. Certainly, people find other ways to end their lives. According to the CDC, in 2010, nearly 10,000 people committed suicide by suffocation and nearly 7,000 by poison. Guns are used in about half the suicides.

According to World Health Organization statistics, the U.S. suicide rate is not out of line with other countries. And there does not seem to be any clear correlation between countries where guns are severely limited and overall suicide rates. So, would guns being less readily available prevent some suicides? Probably, but it seems likely that would have a relatively small effect. One of the factors that has so intensified the gun debate has been the fact that the victims at Sandy Hook were children. The loss of a child is every parent's worst nightmare, a tragedy beyond consolation.

But according to the CDC, of the approximately 5,000 deaths of children under 15 that were the result of one of the 10 leading causes of deaths, only about 230 were killed by guns. And I do not in any way mean to minimize the tragedy and heartbreak of each of those families affected. But their tragedy is little different from the 1,200 who lost their children in car accidents or the 1,100 lost to accidental suffocation or the 720 to accidental drowning. And, in fact, twice as many children younger than 15 were murdered by some other means than gunfire.

It is true, however, that if you go to the CDC's next age bracket (15-24), homicide by firearm became the second-leading cause of death, killing more than 3,800 young people in 2010. Much of this, of course, is related to gang activity.

One of the other interesting trends revealed in the CDC's data is that among the leading causes of death by injury, only car accidents and homicide by firearm are decreasing. Since 2005 (as far back as I could find CDC numbers), deaths from car accidents have fallen 23 percent and homicide by 10 percent. Every other category has increased. Accidental poisonings, most of which are drug-related, are up by 40 percent and caused three times as many deaths in 2010 as homicides by firearms. A recent Pew Institute study showed that homicides committed by gunfire have fallen 50 percent since 1993, but that the public believes it is increasing.

Anything that is killing 30,000 of our fellow residents each year is obviously something that deserves our attention. But as with many other of the issues that the media like to sensationalize, there are probably other issues, like drunken drivers, depression leading to suicide and drug overdoses that deserve more of our attention than guns.