On a day where the United States remained focused on gun violence, a new study revealed that Americans are nearly 30 times more likely to be shot intentionally than to fall victim to an accident.
The Itasca-based National Safety Council said Wednesday that a study of 98 years of gunshot victim data indicates that your odds of being the victim of an intentional assault with a firearm are 1 in 285. Conversely, the chance you would be involved in an accidental shooting is 1 in 8,305.
The Safety Council said firearm-related deaths from preventable, intentional, and undetermined causes totaled 38,658 in 2016, nearly a 7 percent increase from 2015. Suicides accounted for 59 percent of deaths related to firearms, while 37 percent were homicides, and about 1 percent were accidental.
In 2016, 22,938 people took their own lives with a gun, an increase of about 2,700 people in the last ten years. The number of suicides with firearms has been steadily increasing since 2006, while intentional shootings actually declined after that year, showing a marked jump only in the last two years.
Lastly, a category which has been another area of focus, police-involved shootings, was actually rather small. Only 1 percent of all shooting deaths in 2016, about 510, involved law enforcement.
