Gun deaths fell again in the U.S. last year, say provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July – except among children, The Trace reports.
Gun deaths among children under 18 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 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 are from the CDC’s WONDER database, which collects mortality information from state death certificates at the state level.
Shootings claimed 46,728 lives last year, marking the second year in a row that gun deaths fell after reaching an all-time high in 2021. The 2023 total was a 3 percent decrease from 2022, when 48,204 people died from gunshots, and a 4.3 percent decrease from 2021, when 48,830 people were killed.
Even 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 nation, eclipsing car crashes for the seventh year in a row.
The fall in overall gun deaths last year was largely driven by a decrease in firearm homicides. There were 17,927 gun homicides in 2023, an 8.7 percent decrease from 2022, when there were 19,651.
The total number of gun homicides in 2023 was lower than any year since 2019, when 14,414 people were killed.
Guns kill more homicide victims than all other methods combined. Of the 22,829 total homicides in 2023, 79 percent were perpetrated with guns. Other methods — like knives, suffocation, and poisoning — accounted for the remaining 21 percent. A decade earlier, 70 percent of homicides were perpetrated with guns.
Until 2020, the United States had never recorded more than 40,000 gun deaths in a single year.
Seventeen states — including Maine, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, and Alaska — saw gun deaths increase between 2022 and 2023.
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