Guns, Drugs, and Car Crashes: Why Americans Die Younger
Three paths to death explain much of the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other wealthy nations.
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The average American will die as many as two years sooner than if they lived in Western Europe or Japan. This can be attributed, in part, to three of the darker elements of life in the U.S.: gun violence, drug overdoses, and death on the road.
More than 100,000 people in the U.S. lose their lives as a result of these causes every year. For each of the categories, the death rate is far higher in America than in other wealthy countries, according to research published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.