Guns, car crashes and drugs cut US male life expectancy by a year, research says

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Guns, car crashes and drugs cut US male life expectancy by a year, research says

Amanda Holpuch in New York
Tuesday 9 February 2016 16.00 GMT

Gun injuries, car crashes and drug poisoning account for more than one year of shortened life expectancy in American men compared to men in other high-income countries, according to Centers for Disease Control research .

An American man’s life expectancy is cut five months and 14 days shorter because of gun injuries compared with men in 12 other countries, said the research letter, published Tuesday in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama).

Researchers have known that life expectancy in the US is lower than it is in other high-income countries, but the new letter shows that these three types of injuries have a substantial impact on life expectancy in the US.

“I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the impact of firearm deaths, that they’re only 1%-2% of deaths in the US but responsible for 20% of the gap in life expectancy between the US and other countries in men,” said Andrew Fenelon, the lead author of the letter.

The letter is also surprising because Congress has fought proposals to fund CDC research on gun violence since 1996, despite calls from leading medical groups and public health experts. This is thus one of the few government-backed analyses of trends in gun injuries.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/09/guns-car-crashes-drugs-us-male-life-expectancy

[Press Virginia]

1. I like to snort coke through the barrel of my gun

while I text and drive

[hack89]

2. There is no doubt we need to take suicide much more seriously in America

a national anti-suicide campaign would be a good start.

[beevul]

6. Someone needs to remind the controllers that...

Someone needs to remind the controllers that lumping suicides in with murders and calling them "gun violence" doesn't qualify as "taking suicide seriously".

[NaturalHigh]

3. You mean I can own guns, crash cars, and use drugs...

and only lose a year off my life? Sign me up!

Wait - I'm a smoker. Does that affect the equation at all? Also, I enjoy a double scotch every night.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. A general prohibition, entire dedicated law enforcement agencies and cooperation between

local, state, federal and international police hasn't stopped drugs and, apparently, those are as deadly as the guns we're supposed to treat the same way.

However, I can't help but wonder if the gun deaths and the illegal drug trade are more tightly intertwined than the research suggests.

[bolus]

5. you mean one less year pooping on myself in a nursing home?

Im so looking forward to dementia, heart failure, health problems that require a use a walker to barely not make it to the bathroom, loosing my ability to drive, never have a boner again, peeing 20 times a night, eating chicken through a straw, making a trip to the hospital every other month, forgetting the names to all my family. Please sign me up for that extra year.