While overall gun deaths continued to decline from their post-pandemic peak, child gun deaths rose, and gun suicides hit a record high, The Trace reports. As they did in 2022, gun deaths fell again in the United States in 2023, according to provisional data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July – except among children. Gun deaths among children under 18 years old rose from 2,542 in 2022 to 2,581 in 2023. Even though that’s slightly lower than the record set in 2021, it’s still an average of seven kids killed each day, and more than double the death toll endured in 2013, when 1,249 children died from gunshots.
Sixty-three percent of the child gun deaths last year were homicides, while 29 percent were suicides and 5 percent were unintentional shootings. The figures come from the CDC’s WONDER database, which collects mortality information from death certificates at the state level. Shootings claimed 46,728 lives last year, according to the CDC data, marking the second year in a row that gun deaths fell after reaching an all-time high in 2021. Though overall gun deaths fell last year, gun suicides hit an all-time high, and firearm injury was the 14th-leading cause of death in the country, eclipsing car crashes for the seventh year in a row.
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