Actor Alex Baldwin shot and killed someone on Thursday, possibly accidentally. A death that is in addition to the thousands of gunshot deaths in the United States each year.
120 weapons per 100 inhabitants
According to the independent Swiss Small Arms Survey, there is an average of 120 firearms per 100 inhabitants in the United States, counting only artillery held by civilians. And this figure is not likely to drop.
+ 80% in sales between January 2020 and 2021
Last January, the Washington Post reported that some Americans were rushing to arms stores. Two million firearms were sold in the first month of 2021 alone, a peak of 80% from January of the previous year. A year 2020 which already had nearly 23,000 sales, or 64% more than in 2019.
This record in 2021, the American title gave it in particular on the arrival of the Biden administration, in favor of stricter legislation on firearms. Political will in the face of the number of gun deaths in the United States.
486 accidental deaths in 2019
So in the latest figures made available by the US Federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 486 people were accidentally shot dead in 2019. A relatively stable figure for 10 years.
Almost 40,000 gunshot deaths per year
What is much less so, however, is the overall figure for the number of deaths from firearms over the past decade. It includes accidental deaths, suicides, assaults, legal interventions and wars and finally, undetermined causes. We have reviewed all CDC reports for the past 10 years.
While in 2009, 31,347 people died this way, it was 39,707 in 2019 (latest figures available). That is 26.67% more in a decade. An absolute figure but which is confirmed when we calculate the rate of deaths by firearms per 100,000 inhabitants. A rate given by the CDC in its annual reports.
The gun fatality rate is 12.1
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We can indeed see on this graph that the gun death rate indicated by the CDC rose from 10.2 in 2009 to 12.1 in 2019. An increase that the Federal Center puts into perspective in a video published in 2019. He compared this rate to that at the end of the 21st century. In 1977, for example, it reached 14.9.
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