“Buckle up” those bullet-proof vests.
By 2015, shootings are likely to surpass car crashes as one of the leading causes of non-medical deaths in the U.S., Bloomberg News reports.
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Traffic deaths have dropped 22% since 2005, while shooting deaths — including suicides and accidents — have crept up from historic lows a decade ago, the numbers show.
In 2010, 31,328 people died by killer weapons, up from 28,393 in 2000. And in three years, Centers for Disease Control numbers forecast nearly 33,000 shooting deaths, compared to 32,000 traffic deaths, the report said.
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This proves seat belt mandates and safety laws have made driving safer than ever, experts said, while lax gun control laws may have contributed to a bump in shooting deaths.
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“It’s a testament to how much safer our roads are,” Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA, told the Daily News. “There’s the analogy, you have to have license and training to buy a car, why don’t you need them to have a gun?'”
“Guns are obviously more dangerous than automobiles, and we need to think seriously about what kind of laws we need to make the world safer with so many guns.”
Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School — the second mass killing in less than five months — brought fresh outrage against gun violence and calls to ban assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
“We haven’t had a year like 2012 for mass shootings before, with each one being more disturbing than the last,” Daniel Webster, director of gun policy research at Johns Hopkins, told Bloomberg News. “It’s harder to chalk this up to random acts than to flaws in our gun laws.”
Studies show that household gun ownership and murder rates have slumped over the past decade.
Some 32% of households in the U.S. own guns — the lowest since 2004 — and last year, murder rates in the U.S. were down 19% since 2006, the report said.
But, overall, there are more guns in U.S., with estimates landing somewhere around 300 million. And Winkler says anywhere from 5 million to 10 million new guns are added to the nationwide stash every year.
Meanwhile, on the roads, fewer than 40,000 people were expected to die in traffic accidents this year, down from 53,524 in 1979, Bloomberg News’ numbers show.
More guns doesn’t necessarily man more deaths, but some argue that it’s too easy for a madman with a death wish to get his hands on a high-powered rifle.
“We’ve made policy decisions that have had the impact of making the widest array of firearms available to the widest array of people under the widest array of conditions,” Garen Wintemute, a violence prevention expert at UC-Davis told Bloomberg News.
Winkler suggested the economic downturn could be responsible for a rise in crime and suicides.
Last month, a report in the medical journal The Lancet said suicide numbers spiked during the recession. About 1,580 more people killed themselves per year between 2008 and 2010 than before the stock market tanked, the report found.
Every day in the U.S., 85 people are shot to death, more than half by suicide, according to Bloomberg News’ numbers. At least one of the victims under 14.
That average was obliterated in chilling fashion in Newtown, when gunman Adam Lanza shot 26 people at Sandy Hook, 20 of them 5 to 10 years olds.
On Wednesday, the White House tapped Vice President Joe Biden would head up a task force to reign in killer weapons.
Winkler said it appeared as though the Obama administration was finally getting tough on gun control.
“I think we are likely to see proposal for universal mandatory backround checks, a proposal that improves mental health reporting, and it seems likely we are likely to see assault weapons or high capacity magazines,” he said.
