Obama's legacy. BUILD THAT WALL. Heroin Fatalities Surpass Gun Homicides For First Time Health officials revealed that for the first time ever, there were more deaths related to heroin than gun homicides in 2015, contributing to the first drop in U.S. life expectancy since 1993. Deaths from heroin rose by 2,000 since 2015, marking the first time since the 1990s (when Bill Clinton was President) that heroin deaths surpassed deaths from prescription opioid painkillers. While gun homicides numbered