Gun violence in Americans' social network during their lifetime

The overall burden of gun violence death and injury in the US is now well understood. However, no study has shown the extent to which gun violence is associated with the individual lives of Americans.

We used fatal and non-fatal gun injury rates in 2013 from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) and generally accepted estimates about the size of an American's social network to determine the likelihood that any given person will know someone in their personal social network who is a victim of gun violence during their lifetime. We derived estimates in the overall population and among racial/ethnic groups and by gun-injury intent.

The likelihood of knowing a gun violence victim within any given personal network over a lifetime is 99.85% (99.8% to 99.9%). The likelihood among non-Hispanic white, black, Hispanic and other race Americans were 97.1%, 99.9%, 99.5% and 88.9% respectively.

Nearly all Americans of all racial/ethnic groups are likely to know a victim of gun violence in their social network during their lifetime.