Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined
- A 19-year-old gunman allegedly killed 17 of his former classmates at a Florida high school on Wednesday.
- Some 11,000 people in the US are killed in firearm assaults each year.
- Gun violence is a leading cause of death in America, but research on the problem is bootstrapped due to federal funding restrictions passed by Congress.
A 19-year-old allegedly killed 17 of his former classmates at a Florida high school on Wednesday with an AR-15 rifle he purchased legally.
It was the deadliest school shooting in Florida history. The suspected gunman, Nikolas Cruz, had been known as a potential threat to the school, and teachers have bemoaned how they were powerless to stop him.
Cruz's victims join a growing number of people in the US that were intentionally killed at the end of a gun.
Below is how the lifetime odds of dying from gun violence (highlighted in red, gun suicides and accidents excluded) stack up against many causes of death for Americans:
Assaults by firearm kill about 11,000 people in the US each year, which translates to a roughly 1-in-370 lifetime chance of death from gun violence. That's almost 50% more likely than the lifetime odds of dying while riding inside a car, truck, or van.
These measures also suggest Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than the combined risks of drowning, fire and smoke, stabbing, choking on food, airplane crashes, animal attacks, and forces of nature.
Where the data come from
The chart above does not account for a person's specific behaviors, age, sex, location, or other factors that can shift the results; it's an average of the entire US population. But it clearly shows gun violence is a leading cause of death in the US.
The data primarily come from a 2017 report by the National Safety Council and a National Center for Health Statistics' report on causes of death in the US for 2014. The latter report was released in June 2016 and contains the most current information available.
Mass shootings aren't part of the above data sets, but the Gun Violence Archive project keeps a sourced tally, which we've independently counted. The organization considers any event where four or more victims were injured (regardless of death) to be a mass shooting, and in 2014, some 274 mass shootings killed 264 people.
Foreign-born terrorism data comes from Cato Institute terrorism data, and some natural-disaster data comes from Tulane University.
We calculated the lifetime odds of death by applying 2014 life expectancy and population numbers in the US, and our analysis assumes each cause of death won't change drastically in the near future. (Mortality data from prior years suggests these rankings are relatively consistent, with the exception of skyrocketing accidental poisonings due to the opioid epidemic.)