US saw over 1 mln firearm fatalities over past 30 years: study

WASHINGTON - The United States has seen over 1 million firearm fatalities over the past 30 years, according to a new study.

There were roughly 1,110,000 deaths related to firearms -- nearly 86 percent of them among males -- in the country from 1990 to 2021, according to the study, which was recently published in the JAMA Network Open, an open-access medical journal published by the American Medical Association.

The findings also showed that firearm deaths reached a low in 2004 of about 10 for every 100,000 people in the United States.

The rate began to climb back up in 2010, eventually increasing by 45.5 percent to 14.7 firearm deaths per 100,000 people in 2021.

The study also underlined disparities in firearm fatality rates by racial and ethnic group, and these disparities increased in recent years.

Homicides were most common among Black non-Hispanic men aged 20 to 40 years and suicides among White non-Hispanic men aged 70 years or older.

Additionally, annual firearm suicide rates among females increased since 2010, according to the findings.