have drunk drivers killed more people than wars

roads, allowing researchers to identify ways to improve safety.īy contrast, no such federal agency exists to regulate the safety of firearms-and it took decades just to develop a national database for tracking firearm deaths, Lee and her colleagues noted in their paper. One of the agency’s key actions was to create and maintain a public database of automobile deaths on U.S. Congress established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1970 with the goal of saving lives and preventing traffic-related injuries. The decline in vehicle deaths is largely the result of a concerted effort to track and study motor vehicle crashes. Lee et al., in New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. “The crossing of these trend lines demonstrates how a concerted approach to injury prevention can reduce injuries and deaths-and, conversely, how a public health problem can be exacerbated in the absence of such attention,” wrote Lois Lee, a senior associate in medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, and her colleagues in the recent analysis of CDC data, which was published as a Perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine.Ĭredit: Amanda Montañez Sources: Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Crossing Lines-A Change in the Leading Cause of Death among U.S. During the same period, motor-vehicle-related deaths declined from 13.62 to 8.31 per 100,000. From 2000 to 2020, the number of firearm-related deaths in the one-to-24-year-old age group increased from 7.3 per 100,000 people to 10.28 per 100,000, age-adjusted data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal.

The switchover, which happened in 2017, stems from both a reduction in vehicle-related deaths and a grim uptick in gun-related fatalities. But now a new analysis shows that, in recent years, guns have overtaken automotive crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death among people ages one through 24.

For much of the past few decades motor vehicle crashes were the most common cause of death from injury-the leading cause of death in general-among children, teenagers and young adults in the U.S.

Have drunk drivers killed more people than wars