| Deaths in US (annual) | Sources | |
| An assassination | 1 | |
| Assassinations | 9 | Durbin 2021 |
| Mass murders | 722 (2023) | Pew Research 2025 |
| Medicaid cuts 2026 budget | 8,000 – 24,000 | Gaffney 2025 |
| Gun murders | 17,927 (2023) | Pew Research 2025 |
| Gun suicides | 27,300 (2023) | Pew Research 2025 |
| Lack of insurance | 45,000 | Wilper 2009, Woolhandler 2017 |
| Gun deaths | 46,278 (2023) | Pew Research 2025 |
| Drug overdoses | 105,000 (2023) | NIDA 2025 |
| Lack of & Under-Insurance | 195,000 | HJM 2024 |
Comment:
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
One murder is too many. I disagreed often with Charlie Kirk, finding many of his statements reprehensible – inaccurate and demeaning. But I certainly never wished him dead, and do not condone his assassination.
Still, I find the aggressive public mourning from conservatives out of step with the scale of the loss. I am baffled that preventable deaths on a magnitude one to tens of thousands times higher are routinely accepted as the price we must pay to preserve favored American values, such as unrestricted gun ownership and a profoundly failed free market in health insurance.
I provide today’s table as a service to myself and HJM readers, to have close at hand the hard numbers – hard in the sense of quantitative, and hard in the sense of troubling.
Please let’s continue, indeed redouble, our quest for a just and efficient health system and other social changes that drastically reduce these painful numbers.
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