More than 67,000 Americans died from violent injuries in 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report Thursday.
The 2019 total, which is the latest in the series, represents a slight decrease from the previous year’s total of about 68,000 violent deaths and precedes more recent trends of rising homicide rates.
The CDC study found that about 43,100 people died from suicide in 2019, accounting for 64.1 percent of violent deaths, and that half of all suicides involved firearms.
Around 16,800 were killed in homicides, accounting for 25.1 percent of all violent deaths, while the intent behind the violent death could not be determined in 8.7 percent of cases.
More than 67,000 Americans died from violent injuries in 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report Thursday
A crime scene tape is seen in a Washington DC file photo. Around 16,800 were killed in homicides in 2019, accounting for 25.1 percent of all violent deaths
Deaths from legal interference, the study’s term for police killings, accounted for 1.4 percent of the total, or about 940 deaths.
The authors found that Native American men had the highest death rate from legal interference, dying six times more than white men, and that black men were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men.
Still, white males, who make up a higher percentage of the total population, accounted for nearly half of all police killings in 2019.
Regarding suicides, the study found that men were 3.8 times more likely to die from suicide than women.
White individuals accounted for the majority (80.4 percent) of all suicides, however, Native Americans had the highest suicide rate per capita.
Overall, firearms were used in half of all suicides, followed by hanging, strangulation or suffocation. For women, poisoning was the most common method of suicide.
A memorial can be seen at the Cielo Vista Mall Walmart in El Paso, Texas, the site of the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in 2019
Almost half of those who died from suicide had a current diagnosis of a mental health problem, and almost a quarter of them had told someone before they died that they were suicidal.
Of the homicides, a firearm was used 74.6 percent of the time, followed by a sharp instrument (10.1 percent), a blunt instrument (4.1 percent), personal weapons (eg, hands, feet, or fists; 3.7 percent) and hanging. Strangulation or asphyxiation (2.1 percent).
Black men were more likely to be murdered than men of all other racial and ethnic groups and were 19.3 times more likely to die in homicides than Asian Americans, 13.9 times more than Whites, and 5 times more than Hispanics.
Blacks accounted for 60.3 percent of male murder victims and more than half (55.5 percent) of all murder victims.