Deaths from guns are on track to outpace automobile fatalities in the United States within three years, a new analysis has found.
Based on current trends, there will be 32,929 firearm fatalities by 2015 and 32,036 motor-vehicle deaths, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control crunched by Bloomberg News.
Between 2005 and 2010, motor-vehicle deaths declined by an impressive 22 percent.
The fall in traffic deaths resulted from safer vehicles, restricted privileges for young drivers and seat-belt and other laws, Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis, told Bloomberg News.
Almost the reverse was true with guns, however.
“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,” he said.
In 1982, there were about 32,000 gun deaths, compared with 45,000 traffic-accident deaths.
Each day, about 85 Americans are shot dead — 53 of them suicides, and the rest accidents or homicides.