The number of per-year gun deaths in the U.S. is poised to outpace the number of traffic deaths by 2015, except for Louisiana, which is among a handful of states to already eclipse that marker.
The number of per-year gun deaths in the U.S. is poised to outpace the number of traffic deaths by 2015, except for Louisiana, which is among a handful of states to already eclipse that marker.
Earlier this year Bloomberg News released a study conducted after the Sandy Hook massacre late last year, drawing on the most recent data compiled in 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Bloomberg's prediction: By 2015, more Americans will die per year from guns than automobiles.
Nationally, there were 32,885 automobile deaths and 31,672 gun-related deaths in 2010. While automobile deaths still outnumber gun deaths in a majority of states, that wasn't the case for Louisiana and 12 other states, including Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
In Louisiana, 154 more people died by guns in 2010, with firearms taking 864 lives (385 of those being suicides) compared to 710 auto-related deaths posted that year.
According to a release from the Violence Policy Center, the decline in automobile deaths is largely the result of a decades-long push to make highways and vehicles safer, coupled with the fact that firearms remain one of the last consumer products without health or safety regulation from the federal government.
"The idea that gun deaths exceed motor vehicle deaths ... is stunning when one considers that 90 percent of American households own a car while fewer than a third own firearms," Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, says in a prepared statement. "It is also important to consider that motor vehicles - unlike guns - are essential to the functioning of the entire U.S. economy. It is time to end firearms' status as the last unregulated consumer product."