Childhood diseases may overtake birth defects and accidents again soon.
Man, I wish there was something we could do about it. Oh well, one can dream i guess.
If you are in the US, and under roughly 20, the actual leading cause of death is firearms, been like that for the past 5 or 6 years.
https://www.cnn.com/health/guns-death-us-children-teens-dg
Thats from about 6 months ago.
You may also note that the article’s source at CDC:
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D158;jsessionid=63943AC0B45AD52893397A22A027
No longer works, because this information is inconvenient for the current administration of " “pro-life” ", violence loving fascists.
Scientific American, from 2022, has this same trend, but extending the age bracket all the way up to age 24.
Ah you see the fire arms have reduced traffic deaths! This is a good thing. Everyone should solve their issues with the car before or after them with some kind of fire arm. I vote for rocket launchers to be bought for this purpose.
On that train of thought I realllyyy wish that graph had total deaths on it for a more accurate picture of if they decreased or increased… Because it just makes it look like the deaths stayed the same and the other factors are all that is changing
From the second, Scientific American link:
Thats per capita, per 100,000 people, so, not a percentage of all deaths per year… though this is counting ages 1 to 24, and goes only up to 2020.
So… assuming 2020 US population is 330 million, and there are… I dunno uh…
https://buckystats.org/one/US/years?data=perc-by-age-24
Apparently ~31% under 25 yo.
So, ~ 102.3 million under 25 … multiply by about 1023 to go from per capita to actual…
~ 10,515 firearm caused mortalities in 2020 amongst under 25 yos
~ 8,501 motor vehicle caused mortalities in 2020 amongst under 25 yos
There ya go, thats some napkin math.
Overall total is ~19,106, but that is of course only for the top two causes, firearms + cars, leaves out everything else.
Also… they are in this graph doing an age based standardization of all death rates, so… that will throw off this kind of calc I’ve just done, I’d have to have the actual numbers and do actual math to account for that.
From here:
https://buckystats.org/one/US/years?data=mort-perc-by-age-24
Under 25s in 2020 had 628 per Million deaths, so that works out to ~ 64,275 actual deaths.
Also I should clarify that for all this, its 1 to 24, not 25 and under, 1 and under is all classed as infant mortality and is its own thing, so my population proportions will be a bit off from that number not making that distinction…
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs//data/nvsr/nvsr72/nvsr72-10.pdf
Ah ok, page 15, 19,582 total infant deaths in 2020, so, take that out of 64,275 and you get ~ 44,693 1 - 24 yo deaths in 2020.
If we eyeball the % graph from my original comment, thats about 38% for those top causes of death combined, which is about ~15,192 for both if them, or if you say 16% is cars, thats about ~7159 and if you say 18% is firearms, thats about ~ 8045.
That’s a bit misleading considering the vast majority of those firearm deaths are suicides. Calling it simply firearms makes it sound like murder rates are insanely high and that isn’t the case. That’s not to say firearm deaths aren’t a major problem, just that presenting it in this fashion will lead many to draw an incorrect conclusion about the data.
Suicides and murders and accidents, in each case it’s the killing efficiency of firearms that makes such high rates possible.
Yes, but there’s only one of those possible uses that immediately comes to most people’s mind when you use the term firearm death / fatality / injury / etc. If you don’t specify that all of these are included in your statistic then you are leaving the door open for wildly misleading uses of this information. That is explicitly the opposite of the intent behind statistical analysis.
I think I’m a part of most people and I’m well aware that firearms kill people a lot of ways. It’s not just school mass shootings, police brutality, and gangs. Most Americans know, or at least know of, someone who killed themselves with a gun. And many know someone who shot someone by accident.
In other words, you’re fine with leaving room for misinterpretation because you personally have enough background info to understand the context. Cool cool
I’d like to direct your attention to “poisoning,” which is even more vague.
I suppose a person with bad intentions could deliberately pull any of the individual numbers out of context and use it as “evidence” for their political point.
But anyone who reads the whole thing is going to notice that most of the categories include suicides as an unstated percentage. Especially “accidents.”
Yes, and as was pointed out elsewhere poisoning is a very misleading category as well because it includes drug overdoses which is not immediately obvious in much the same way as we are discussing with firearms.
I’m not sure what you think you’re accomplishing here though. You seem to be agreeing with me that some of these categories have the potential to be misunderstood and yet you’re presenting an additional data point that helps make that case as if it disproves what I am saying. Are you just categorically opposed to agreeing with someone else without being a dick about it?
Its only misleading if you are not capable of realizing a person can shoot themselves or another person.
Calling it simply a firearm means that a firearm caused the death.
Thats it.
If you automatically read context into that, context that is not there, that’s either a you problem or a literacy problem.
Also:
https://www.thetrace.org/2025/07/gun-homicide-suicide-data-link-study/
Over the course of five decades, the data showed that the strongest association between an increase in homicide rates and elevated suicide risk occurred in rural communities and among white populations. A one-point increase in the overall homicide rate correlated to a 3.6 percent increase in the suicide rate the following year, according to the study. The correlation was even more stark between firearm-related deaths: For every one-point rise in the firearm homicide rate, there was a 5.7 percent increase in firearm suicides.
tl:dr, firearm homicide and suicide rates are well corellated with a time lag.
We can say that a big problem is simply too much access to too many guns and say that with data as well.
“These results would suggest violence prevention is suicide prevention, and that we can reduce suicides by reducing violence in local communities.”
“We know that suicide and homicide in some ways have a lot of the same drivers,” said Dr. Emmy Betz, an emergency physician and public health scholar at the University of Colorado who specializes in firearm suicide prevention. “Poverty, lack of access to reliable housing or food, relationship stressors, and domestic violence can all increase the risk of suicide or homicide.”
The… so obvious it hopefully doesn’t have to be stated… but apparently it actually does… part, being:
It is significantly easier to kill either yourself or another person with a firearm, than without one.
Its even easier than via using a car, in the US.
Plenty of people kill themselves and others in car accidents or otherwise using/involving a car… but the above graph is as agnostic to intent, to victim/perpetrator with cars as it is with guns, but for some reason, you don’t bring that up, that doesn’t need to be specifically clarified.
If people assumed that deaths from car crashes were usually intentionally inflicted on others, as they do with firearms, then yes, I would expect you to clarify that most car crashes are accidents when citing statistics about them that are not specific enough to convey that information on their own. If you think clarity in these matters is unimportant then you are in no position to be lecturing me about the proper use of statistics. Thanks for being a dick though, that’s super conducive to meaningful discussion.
You literally just could have said:
For clarity, in this graph, ‘Firearm’ means any death caused by a firearm.
Instead of asserting disingenuousness on the part of the graph or article with more context it was pulled from, which I provided a link to.
That would be how to discuss this constructively, vs antagonistically.
Perhaps you have… evidence for your naked assertion related to the prevelance of assumptions/interpretations around specific terminology/vocabulary, in certain contexts?
As a counter to your personal interpretation… beyond having a career as a data analyst, I’ve also had a bit of and off an on hobby of shooting, at gun ranges.
I can very much tell you that the gun immersed culture has… very different (and often much more precise) understandings of all terminology that is any way related to firearms, than people who have essentially zero experience or familiarity or proper training with firearms.
And, in the US… quite a lot of people are far more dedicated to firearms as a hobby or even lifestyle than in… probably anywhere else in the world, per capita.
We do have more privately owned guns than people here, I can’t say I’m aware of any other country with that kind of a statistic… maybe Afghanistan? Syria?
Switzerland maybe? But… their gun laws work in a way that I really think in an ideal world, the US could somehow move toward, much more restrictve than the US, but much less restrictive than many other countries.
I told you that the statistic was presented in a misleading manner and clarified the correct context which is exactly what you’re now suggesting I should have done. If you inferred anything else from my original comment then that’s on you.
I wonder if poisoning counts stuff like overdose/alcohol poisoning because that one seems strange
Source is a bit outdated now, 2018 (didn’t realize when I posted that), but it’s primarily from drugs apparently. Both prescription and non-prescription.
A bit sad that they didn’t try to distinguish between accidents and suicide. But that’s probably hard to know in most cases.
Yeah, makes sense then
A drug overdose is termed as a posioning in these kinds of formats/contexts, for whatever reason.
The vast majority of these ‘poisonings’ are not like… snake bites, food poisoning, radiation poisoning, cyanide… they are overdoses of some kind, meth, fentanyl, prescription drugs, alcohol, etc.
I wonder if food poisoning (microbes like e. coli, listeria, salmonella) counts. Oooooh, or Botox gone wrong??
Back in the 90s, when you broke up with someone, you poisoned them. it was the fashion.
Hah!
I was going to post Alice Cooper’s “Posion” as a joke response, but then I watched the music video, and its basically a 45 year old describing how he can barely resist deflowering an 18 yo.
So… yeah.
I’m going with ‘rape culture’ was more the norm in the 90s.
Yes it does. We’re not talking Agatha Christie here.
Spouse that’s tired of yo shit.
Who came up with this graphic design?
What a terrible way to show this data, and only shows a small amount of info.
Could’ve been 6 lines if text and imparted as much.
How else would you know that between 4-5, 24-25, 44-45 and 64-45, you were IMMORTAL.
Yeah… If this needed to be a graphic, a line or bar chart showing the relative rates of these handful of mortality causes would have been so much easier to read and conveyed more information.
Lokhir of Rorikstead: an arrow to the ankle.
This graphic is incorrect. The biggest concern at my age is rogue samurai.
And quicksand
Sounds like you should have spent more time studying the blade
Well I’m still alive, aren’t I?
Poisoning? Do I have an enemy I don’t know about?
Poisoning can be accidental.
Yeah, it’s yourself
My thought exactly. How many of those “accidents” were spouses or family trying to get rid of someone
Does this not vary by sex?
So I already beat everything, including cancer and heart disease, so I should be immortal, right?
Poison?!?
Overdose.
Accidental poison
We’re in our poison era, friend
Woohoo! Beat poisoning … now i just have to worry about cancer
Cancer is the unbeatable end boss.
Not always. My wife just beat stage 3 colon cancer. The chemo effects, however - that’s been more trouble.
What they likely meant is that everyone will eventually get a cancer that will kill them if they live long enough.
Well, I better ramp up the poisoning then, only got a few more years to avoid cancer.
Eh what? Is this factual? Cars kill way more at all stages
I highly doubt that cars kill more people than heart disease.
Edit: You’re extremely incorrect. In the US
In 2023, 919,032 people died from cardiovascular disease.
In 2023, there were 40,990 motor vehicle related deaths.
Sorry, I meant after heart disease ofc
