Gun violence has reached historic proportions in the United States. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2020, American children 19 and under were killed more by gunshots than by any other non-medical cause.
Indeed, during the year 2020, 4357 young people under the age of 20 died because of firearms. This cause of death has thus exceeded car accidents, which for their part killed 3,913 American children in 2020.
Deaths by suffocation come third (1411), followed by drownings (966).
In addition, the number of young people killed by gunshots increased by almost 30% between 2019 and 2020. This increase is twice as high as that for the general population.
According to health experts, quoted by the New England Journal of Medicine, this statistic once again demonstrates that gun violence has increased significantly since the start of the pandemic.
For 21 years, car accidents have always come first in the ranking of causes of death of children. The gap has narrowed a lot since 2016, however, the CDC says.
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