As it stands, we’re probably going to be waiting a bit before we see details about 2025’s “gun crime” statistics. It always takes a bit of time to break those down, though, so that’s not unusual. On Thursday, Cam took a look at 2024’s numbers as they applied to Florida, which had just achieved real permitless carry.
Now, I’m going to look at them at a more national level, because Florida’s numbers don’t really matter if you don’t live in Florida, except in an academic sense. The rest of us live in other parts of the country.
Plus, national statistics are often the ones used to push for gun control laws in the halls of Congress.
So, let’s look at what we’ve got.
Firearm homicides in the United States fell sharply in 2024, but gun suicides reached a record high, according to a new analysis of federal mortality data by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
The report, based on newly released data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 44,447 people died from firearm-related injuries in 2024, down about 5% from the previous year. The decline was driven largely by a nearly 16% drop in firearm homicides, which fell to 15,364 deaths.
At the same time, firearm suicides rose to a record 27,593 deaths, accounting for about 62% of all firearm deaths in 2024.
The report’s authors also found that firearms remained the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1 to 17 for the fifth consecutive year, with 2,214 deaths in 2024.
The fact that they continue to exclude children under the age of 1 is infuriating because they know doing otherwise would cause the numbers to drop like a rock. Or, if they’re going to do that, how about breaking the numbers down by age cohorts? Then, at least, people would see which group is being shot, and it’s not the little rugrats running around the elementary school playground.
I’ve tread that ground aplenty, though, including earlier today.
Now, let’s understand that a 16 percent drop in homicides is fantastic, especially considering how those numbers keep sliding down at a significant rate. That’s huge, and it’s very good news.
On the issue of suicides, though, there’s clearly work to be done. However, let’s also remember that there were 27,300 firearm suicides in 2023. For those even worse at math than I am, that’s a difference of just 293.
In a country of 330 million people.
Now, again, there’s still work to do, but this wasn’t a crisis-level jump in the numbers.
Plus, I really do hate them lumping suicides in with homicides to create “gun deaths” as a statistic, because the two are very different in every way that leads up to a finger on the trigger. The mechanisms are different, and so the solutions are different.
Suicide is a mental health issue, and we’d do well to start treating it like one. Instead, we get the numbers conflated into one big total that hides the facts and helps people ignore the truth that there are tens of thousands of people each year who opt for a permanent solution to temporary problems. We can help them, and we can do it not because of the numbers, but because it’s the decent thing to do. Our neighbors are suffering, and we should do more to help with that.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t sell gun control as well, so until then, we get stuff like this.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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