How Many Americans Are Shot Each Year?

by Tracy R. Walsh

It’s difficult to tell:

An initial push to create a national database of firearm injuries in the late 1980s and early 1990s was slowed by the political fight over Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for gun research, according to a history of the project written by researchers who worked on it. To make the effort more politically viable, as well as more scientifically rigorous, researchers decided to collect data on all violent deaths, not just firearm deaths. And to cut costs, they decided to focus only on fatal injuries. Even that more limited effort has languished without full congressional funding – the database currently covers fewer than half of all states.

Most discussions of crime trends in America look back 20 years, to 1993, when violent crime of all kinds hit its peak. Compare 1993 to today, and the picture looks bright: The number of murders is down nearly 50 percent, and other kinds of violent crime have dropped even further. … But over the same time period, CDC estimates show that the number of Americans coming to hospitals with nonfatal, violent gun injuries has actually gone up: from an estimated 37,321 nonfatal gunshot injuries in 2002 to 55,544 in 2011. The contrast between the two estimates is hard to clear up, since each data source has serious limitations.