CDC Gun Deaths
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps vital statistics on the U.S. population. Among the data are gun deaths by homicide, suicide, and unintentional shootings, among other causes.
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The Trace considers this dataset the most reliable source of gun death statistics available.
The CDC collects and produces this data from death certificates submitted by each state and territory. It shows gun deaths of all types, including homicides, accidents, legal interventions, and suicides. The latter regularly make up over half of all gun-related fatalities.
There is considerable lag time, usually a full calendar year behind the present day.
The CDC calculates age-adjusted rates to make up for the disproportionate representation among certain age groups in various mortality statistics, including gun deaths. Read more here about how, why, and when to use age-adjusted rates instead of crude rates.
The Trace aggregates this data by year, geography (state, county, and urbanization, like rural, urban or suburban), age, race, and ethnicity. Explore the different tables to find the information you’re interested in.
Limitations
- Lag time: Data can take over a year to be finalized. For example, 2022 data was not available until April 2024.
- Death data here is measured by the geography of the person’s residence, not where the death occurred. Deaths by place of occurrence can be queried using the WONDER tool.
- Death counts under 10 in any given combination of categories are suppressed on WONDER and not available here.
- Caution is strongly advised if using the numbers to calculate sums, averages, and so on, because values for some subsets are suppressed, missing, not available, or not applicable.
- The Trace has reported that “the reliability of the CDC’s unintentional shooting death data has come under question in recent years, as studies have found that gun accidents are sometimes classified as homicides.”
- Research has found that some groups are misclassified in mortality data more than others — especially true in the case of those with American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry, and to a lesser degree for people of Hispanic/Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage.
Methodology
The Trace queried the CDC WONDER online portal in January 2025. The files the CDC provides on the portal are difficult to use, so we cleaned them by removing values like Suppressed, Missing, Unreliable, or Not Applicable. (The original queries can be checked to see where those terms applied — reach out to the Hub if you need to do that for your work.)
The CDC has changed the way it tracks race in recent years, so for data on race and ethnicity we focus on information from 2018 forward, using the CDC’s six “single race” categories (about which you can read more here). We did not include provisional or partial data, since those figures may change.