Hellhole Both Domestic & Foreign
There isn’t a Trump speech or rally where he doesn’t call out his desire to make America Great Again.
He also regularly states that places like Chicago or Detroit (hellholes in his parlance) are places where people are being shot at alarming rates. Trump isn’t wrong as both have more gun violence than most other nations.
Yet to be truthful, it isn’t only big cities where firearms kill lots of Americans. According to The Commonwealth Fund, rural Mississippi has more deaths with guns than that “hellhole” of Haiti. The U.S. ranked 16th out of 204 other countries and territories for firearms mortality.
Venezuela was first. But the U.S. Virgin Islands was third and Puerto Rico was twelfth, both U.S. territories. Their deaths were not included in the U.S. numbers.
When it comes to childhood mortality by firearms, we rank in the 92nd percentile with 3.66 children and teens being killed per 100,000 between the ages of 0–19. Apparently, the only thing Americans hold in lower esteem than children are women where we are in the 96th percentile with 4 women being killed per 100,000. Honduras has the highest rate of deaths by guns for women with 11.3. The Democratic Republic of the Congo shoots women at a rate of .83 per 100,000.
Mississippi, Louisianna, and Alabama have gun mortality rates like countries that are in a state of war. Florida, another bastion of freedom, has a rate of 5.04 which is higher than the U.S. average of 4.5. Black Americans are 3 times more likely to die by guns than White Americans. Yet Whites are higher than Hispanics and also have 4 times the number of deaths than Asian Americans.
Annually 43,000 deaths are linked to guns in the U.S. Almost all are preventable. The deaths drive down our life expectancy averages. It is estimated that this preventable tragedy costs our economy $557 billion per year. The nation’s quality of life is worse off, and the hard costs equal $1,700 per taxpayer.
These figures are based on 2022 statistics. Since then, the numbers seem to have grown more staggering, but final figures for 2023 have not been gathered in full yet.
Possession of firearms for protection may have made differences in individual cases, but many of the deaths that have occurred were because the weapons were available. Such as when a husband and wife had an argument or children found loaded weapons unsecured.
The next time Trump calls out Haiti for being a dangerous place, he needs to be reminded that Mississippi beats it. Chicago and Detroit are safer than Biloxi. And while we are not #1 when it comes to gun deaths, we are 16th, way ahead of China and anywhere in Europe except perhaps Russia and Ukraine.
