According to one calculation, incidents involving firearms have replaced road accidents as the leading cause of death of young people up to the age of 19 in the USA. More than 4,300 children and adolescents died from firearms in 2020 – for example, in homicides and unintentional killings, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor report in the "New England Journal of Medicine". The authors led by the physician Patrick Carter analyzed data from the US health authority CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) for the age group from 1 to 19 years.
Through traffic accidents, around 3,900 children and adolescents died in the same year. The third most common cause of death were poisoning and overdoses with drugs: there were more than 1,700 deaths among young people - this corresponded to an increase of more than 83 percent compared to the previous year. The scientists also calculated that the deaths caused by firearms in the age group from 2019 to 2020. "The increasing rate of fatal firearm incidents is a long -term trend and shows that we continue to miss protecting our youngest population from an avoidable cause of death," says epidemiologist Jason Goldstick, first author of the study.
According to the researchers, more than 45,000 people in the United States died from firearms in 2020 – an increase of more than 13 percent compared to 2019. In particular, the number of homicides increased by more than 33 percent. For a long time, road accidents were by far the main cause of the death of children and adolescents, says Carter. "But as vehicles and their drivers have become safer, these types of deaths have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years.
