America's Top Killing Machine--the gun or the automobile? - The Atlantic

Headlines are quick hits from media outlets from Missouri and around the world. Follow the headline link for the full story. The source of this headline says:

For the better part of a century, the machine most likely to kill an American has been the automobile.

Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Firearms killed 32,251 people in the United States in 2011, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control has data.

But this year gun deaths are expected to surpass car deaths. That's according to a Center for American Progress report, which cites CDC data that shows guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015. Already more than a quarter of the teenagers—15 years old and up—who die of injuries in the United States are killed in gun-related incidents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Link: 

America's Top Killing Machine--the gun or the automobile? - The Atlantic

MoBikeFed comment: The "guns will kill more Americans than automobiles" headline has swept across many U.S. newspapers and other publications in the past year.

This is a sort of macabre competition about which thing kills more of us than the other.

It is true that for the past 100 years or so, automobiles have killed far more Americans annually than guns--a fact that Americans have accepting with an amazing lassitude as just a normal and accepted part of daily life.

Besides killing 30-40,000 Americans each year, motor vehicles seriously injure over 2 million annually in the U.S. If you stop and think about it, the death and injury toll really is fantastically high.

"Improving safety for all road users" is one of the four main goals in MoBikeFed's Vision for Bicycling and Walking in Missouri. We believe that the issue of roadway injuries and deaths has been overlooked for far too long.

We believe the time is right to embrace a Vision Zero approach to roadway deaths in Missouri and in America. Over the past 50 years, we as a country have taken steps to dramatically reduce the number of roadway injuries and deaths.

Now it is time to take the next step and drive those roadway fatalities down to as near zero as we can.

http://mobikefed.org/VisionZero