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| - Misleading: Over 40,000 gun deaths in US last year include suicides, not just homicides
On June 5, a journalist at Shanghai Daily, Andy Boreham, claimed on X that 43,000 Americans were killed by guns last year, with an image indicating that 117 Americans succumbed to gun violence every day on average.
Boreham somehow linked it to the commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which he calls a “color revolution,” on June 4, alluding that “death and misery” were taking place every day in the U.S. in 2023, not just on June 4. The tweet received more than 200 reposts and over 760 likes.
Annie Lab looked into this claim and found that although the 43,000 death toll is a reliable statistical figure, it includes firearm suicides, which consistently make up the highest number of gun deaths every year.
Through keyword searches, we found a website by a U.S. non-profit organization, the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, that said 42,967 people died from gun-related injuries in 2023. Suicides took up 56% of the death toll.
The figure is sourced from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a data collection and research group in the country. GVA’s website shows a historical record of firearm deaths. At the time of writing, the exact number of “suicide by firearm” in 2023 is changed to “pending,” contingent on better data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
On its methodology page, GVA says that it compiles data by collecting daily information from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources. Its data has been frequently cited by news outlets such as BBC News, ABC News, and Axios.
Annie Lab also looked into the information on the CDC’s website. In 2022, the most recent data available as of this writing, a total of 48,204 firearm-related deaths were recorded in the U.S.
The number of deaths was categorized into five groups — suicides, unintentional deaths, undetermined, legal protection and homicides. Suicides made up the highest number of firearm deaths (27,032, or 56.1%) followed by homicides (19,651, or 40.8%).
From 2018 to 2021, suicides continued to make up more than half of firearm deaths, according to the CDC. The data is based on death certificates for U.S. residents.
The issue of gun control remains controversial in the United States. Recently, President Joe Biden joined gun control activists in calling for more initiatives to help fight against gun violence during a conference in Washington.
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