You hear every day about the increasing obesity rate in US and its accompanying metabolic syndromes (from heart disease to diabetes), which has turned into the first cause of death in the country. Heart disease is the first cause of death amongst Americans, while diabetes, the fourth (the second cause is smoking and the third non-smoking related cancers). But violent death still takes an important toll.

In 2005, 15,962 Americans in 16 states experienced a violent death, as shown by data gathered by the National Violent Death Reporting System and published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The majority (56.1%) of the violent deaths were suicides, followed by homicides and deaths involving legal intervention (29.6%), deaths of undetermined intent (13.3%), and unintentional firearm deaths (0.7%).

The main factors associated to violent deaths were domestic violence and relationship issues, mental health problems, and drug and alcohol consumption. In about 87% of cases when homicide was followed by the suicide of the perpetrator, a personal crisis took place in the two weeks before the incident. 20% of the suicides were committed by former or current military personal.

Between 2000 and 2005, 180,000 Americans committed suicide. 30,000 commit suicide annually, one at each 16 minutes and most have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. 96,000 Americans got killed in the same period (homicides). 2004 FBI data estimated a rate of 5.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, mainly by firearm.

Programs aimed to increase social problem-solving and coping skills, and skills for facing with stressful life events could decrease the rate of violent deaths. Overall, 50,000 Americans experience a violent death annually (137 per day). For a comparison, heart disease kills about 520,000 persons in the US each year, and smoking about 445,000 persons (of which about two thirds are men and one third women). One in every five deaths in the US is smoking related, mostly lung cancer.