The prevalence of firearms in the US is driving the public health crisis of gun deaths, research shows

Archie Bleyer, MD, remembers the day his research focus shifted. His 12-year-old grandson’s classmate and football teammate died from a gun. He knew the boy’s mother and said her son “left a note and used the gun, but didn’t have to die because he was having a bad day.”

In another case, his patient woke up to hear his son was committing suicide with a gun.

These events changed Bleyer’s life.

Bleyer is a professor of clinical research at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. He has been a pediatric oncologist since 1971 and focuses on the prevention and treatment of cancer in adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 39 years. He continues to conduct cancer research, but over the past decade his focus has shifted to a disturbing trend: More young people are now dying from bullets than from cancer. And the number is going up.

Bleyer is lead author of a recent study in the news PLOS ONE they examined data on mental health disorders and firearms from 2000 to 2019. Using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Health Burden, the researchers compared the United States to 40 countries with similar sociodemographic profiles. They found that while the prevalence of mental disorders in the US is similar in all major categories to that in forty comparable socio-demographic countries, the number of deaths from firearms is twenty times greater.

“We have the same level of mental health problems as other countries, but the firearm death rate is much higher and continues to rise,” Bleyer said. “Firearm deaths are declining in most countries.”

Since 2000, total firearm deaths have increased by 23%. In the other 40 countries combined in the study, firearm deaths fell by 27% over the same time.

“In every other country, gun deaths fell, despite similar rates of mental illness,” Bleyer said.

Bleyer has been invited by Texas Doctors Working to End Gun Violence to present the research results at the Texas State Capitol on Friday, September 27.

Bleyer said it is important to note that this study does not undermine the mental health crisis in the US

“We have significant mental health issues, there’s no question about that,” he said. “We don’t have enough mental health providers, facilities and treatments. It is the way we have facilitated the killing of ourselves that leads to death by firearm, taking it to the extreme.”

Bleyer said polls show that most of the public, as well as the leaders of both major political parties, believe mental illness is responsible for the high gun death rate in the US. His research points to another connection: firearm deaths by suicide have risen 18% in the past decade, and firearm deaths by homicide have risen 39% since 2000. in some cases higher rates of mental disorders.

The difference is simply weapons. The US has 4% of the world’s population, but nearly 25%, or one in four, of the world’s firearms – and half of its non-military assault weapons – are in American households. Bleyer said that percentage is increasing.

“Firearm deaths are a public health crisis in the U.S.,” Bleyer said. “The prevalence of mental health disorders does not explain the higher death rate from firearms. The difference is that in this country we have a way to push those mental health problems to the extreme by using firearms, which lead to death.”