Gun Suicides Reach Record High in 2022, Provisional Data Show

The overall rate of suicide by guns in the United States increased 1.6% between 2021 and 2022, reaching an all-time high, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data wereanalyzed by researchers at the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.“The provisional data show that the American epidemic of gun violence persists,” Ari Davis, M.P.P., a policy advisor with the center at Johns Hopkins, said in a news release. “[G]un suicides continue to take the lives of elderly White men at high rates and increasingly the lives of Black teens .”Davis and colleagues analyzed provisional data from the CDC ’sWONDER database, which uses death certificates to identify causes of death for U.S. residents and includes demographic information. The data are not yet finalized, and the CDC expects to release the 2022 data this winter. In past years, changes between provisional and final data have been minor, the researchers noted.A total of 26,993 people died by gun suicide in 2022, up from 26,328 deaths in 2021 —which was previously considered the highest number of gun suicides since the CDC began recording such data in 1968. From 2020 to 2021, gun suicides increased 8.3%, the largest one-year increase recorded in over four decades, aprevious report found.Additional findings from the 2022 data included the following:The gun suicide rate among Black children and teens tripled from 2003 to 2022.In 2022, the gun suicide rate among...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Black teens CDC elderly men gun deaths gun homicide gun suicide Johns Hopkins Center for Violence Solutions provisional data Source Type: research