6,398 and 6,335
Two numbers from 2023. Nearly identical. Both represent a kind of death that was preventable. Both represent a system that stopped short of the people who needed it most.
In 2023, 6,398 veterans died by suicide. Approximately 17.5 per day. The number comes from the VA's National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. It has been cited in congressional testimony, policy proposals, and veterans' advocacy campaigns. It appears, regularly, in places designed to generate concern.
In the same year, 6,335 motorcyclists died in crashes. Approximately 17.4 per day. The number comes from NHTSA. It appears in highway safety reports and motorcycle advocacy campaigns, and in the "motorcycles are dangerous" conversation I deal with professionally.
These numbers are not equivalent. The mechanisms are different. The populations are different. The pain of each death lands differently on the people who survived it. I am not equating them. I am placing them next to each other because the structural problem behind both numbers is the same, and because that problem is not being named.
The VA has tools. REACH VET is a predictive analytics model that identifies veterans with elevated risk profiles and flags them for outreach. The Veterans Crisis Line exists and is staffed. Peer support programs operate across the country. Mental health care, residential programs, and community-based outreach all exist within the VA system.
61% of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 had not received VA healthcare in the year before their death.
The majority of veterans who died by suicide last year were not in the VA system. Approximately 60% had no VA contact at all in the two years before they died, according to RAND research. REACH VET is a sophisticated tool. It cannot reach a veteran who is not in the VA database.
The tools are built for people already inside the door.
MSF has tools. The Basic RiderCourse is offered by certified instructors across the country. The Advanced RiderCourse exists. State endorsement programs exist. Training exists. The infrastructure to deliver safe rider education is real and functional.
34% of motorcyclists who died in crashes in 2023 had no valid motorcycle license endorsement. They were not in the training system. They never completed a basic course, never interacted with a certified instructor, never entered the ecosystem where the training lives.
The training is built for people already inside the door.
This is not an indictment of the VA. It is not an indictment of the MSF. Both institutions are staffed by people doing work that matters, and both have real, documented impacts on the people they reach. The programs they run save lives.
But a system designed to serve people who have opted in will always fall short of the people most at risk — because "most at risk" and "most likely to opt in" are not the same population. In both cases, they are frequently the opposite.
Veterans at the highest risk for suicide are often the most disconnected from VA services: the ones who distrust the system, who didn't receive a diagnosis that would bring them in, who are geographically isolated, who fall through administrative gaps, who don't identify with the institutional definition of "veteran." Riders at the highest risk for fatal crashes are often the ones who never got licensed: the ones who borrowed a bike, who learned informally, who decided that training was for other people, who live in places where MSF courses aren't accessible, who are doing the same thing everyone around them does without any of the infrastructure.
Both risk profiles are defined in part by absence — absence from the systems built to help them. The systems' answer to absence has largely been to make the door better. The door is fine. The people dying aren't walking through it.
New Mexico is not a random example.
New Mexico has approximately 150,000 veterans — about 8.6% of the state population, placing it among the highest veteran concentrations in the nation (13th by percentage). Four active military installations anchor a military culture that runs deep in communities across the state: Kirtland Air Force Base, Holloman AFB, White Sands Missile Range, Cannon AFB.
New Mexico also has approximately 120,426 licensed motorcycle endorsement holders. That's roughly 5.7% of the state population. The national per-capita endorsement rate runs around 2.9%. New Mexico's rate is nearly double.
Both populations are above-average concentrated in the same state. Both are also dying at above-average rates.
New Mexico's veteran suicide rate stands at 46.9 per 100,000 — 38% above the national veteran rate of 33.9 (2021 data, the most recent state-level data available). The VA's own analysis found NM's rate "significantly higher than the national Veteran suicide rate" after age adjustment. Higher than the national veteran rate. Higher than the national general population rate.
The programs exist here. The New Mexico Motorcycle Safety Program offers Basic RiderCourse training at sites in Albuquerque, Alamogordo, Farmington, Las Cruces, and Roswell. VA facilities operate in the state. The Veterans Crisis Line is national.
New Mexico is a concentrated demonstration of what happens when the tools are real, the populations are present, and the reach still stops at the door. We are a state where both communities are above-average in size, above-average in risk, and above-average in outcomes. The tools aren't aimed at the wrong population. They're aimed at the wrong location within that population — at the people already inside, not at the ones who never came in.
These populations are not separate.
The demographic profile of the American veteran and the demographic profile of the American motorcycle rider share significant overlap. Both skew male. Both skew toward working-class communities. Both involve a specific relationship to controlled risk, physical autonomy, and communities built around doing something others consider dangerous. Veterans are more likely than the general population to own motorcycles and to ride.
Traumatic brain injury runs through both. Veterans with TBI face a 56% higher suicide risk. TBI combined with substance use disorder raises that risk by 68%. TBI also impairs the kind of rapid situational assessment that riding safely requires — the continuous visual scanning, the anticipatory risk modeling, the physical coordination that good riders build through training and maintain through practice. A rider with an undiagnosed TBI riding without formal training is not facing the same set of risks as the general ridership.
Some portion of the 6,335 motorcycle fatalities in 2023 were veterans. Some portion of the 6,398 veteran suicides involved motorcycles, directly or indirectly. No data source currently tracks this overlap systematically. That absence of data is not a neutral fact. It is a structural choice that keeps both conversations from seeing the same picture.
Neither number is diminished by the other. The overlap makes both worse.
Both numbers are probably low.
The VA report acknowledges data limitations: some veteran deaths are not identified as veteran deaths because veteran status wasn't captured at the time of death. Manner-of-death classifications are made by individual medical examiners and coroners who do not all have access to the same information. Single-vehicle accidents — a motorcycle that left the road, a car that drove off a bridge — are sometimes ruled accidents and sometimes ruled suicides based on available evidence. The category someone ends up in depends on what the investigator knew and what they decided to look for.
NHTSA motorcycle fatality data is less reliable at capturing delayed deaths — riders who sustained fatal injuries and died days or weeks later from complications. The official number represents the floor, not the ceiling.
When the numbers say 6,398 and 6,335, they mean at least that many.
What would a system designed to reach the unreached look like?
For veteran suicide prevention: it would have to operate outside the VA, in spaces where disconnected veterans actually are. That means barbershops, gun ranges, hunting and fishing communities, motorcycle clubs, blue-collar workplaces, rural communities where the nearest VA clinic is three hours away. It means peer-based outreach by veterans who have earned credibility in those spaces — not by credentials, but by showing up consistently in the right places. It means accepting that the most at-risk veterans may never walk into a VA building and building for that reality rather than for the version where everyone who needs help comes and asks for it.
For motorcycle safety: it means instruction that reaches people before they get on a bike, or who have been on bikes for years without ever engaging the training infrastructure. That means working through the social networks where riding is already happening — informal groups, communities, the places where people learn to ride from each other without ever interacting with a certification program. It means meeting people where they are, not where the curriculum assumes they'll be.
In both cases, it means treating disconnection from institutional systems as the core design problem — not as a communication problem to be solved with a better brochure.
I'm a motorcycle instructor. My students are people who have already passed the basic course and decided to keep learning. By definition, they're inside the system. They showed up, got the endorsement, sought out more training. They represent a self-selected group that skews toward the population least likely to die in a crash precisely because they've already made a series of decisions that the highest-risk riders haven't made.
I can make better riders out of people who are already trying to be safe. I can't reach the riders who aren't there.
That gap isn't a failure of effort. It's a failure of design. The same design failure exists in veteran suicide prevention. The same number of people are dying from it every year.
6,398 and 6,335. Both numbers represent a failure that isn't about the presence of tools. It's about where the tools stop. That's a solvable problem. We haven't solved it yet.
Sources: VA National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (2023); VA National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (2025, with 2023 data); NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts — Motorcycles 2023; RAND Corporation veteran mental health access research; VA REACH VET program documentation; VA New Mexico Veteran Suicide Data Sheet 2021; VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline: Assessment and Management of Patients at Risk for Suicide; New Mexico DWS Veterans Profile 2024; Motorcycle Safety Foundation / NMMSP data; National Safety Council Injury Facts 2023.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis or thoughts of suicide:
Veterans Crisis Line: Call 988, then press 1 | Text 838255 | Chat at veteranscrisisline.net
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988
If you or someone you know has been riding without an endorsement, maybe today's the day to start changing that:
New Mexico Motorcycle Safety Program (NMMSP): nm-msp.org | Get started with the Basic RiderCourse | 877-667-8880
