The latest report illustrates “just how bad gun violence has gotten in the US and how it’s something we should be talking about far more than we do,” said Evan Gumas, a research associate at the Commonwealth Fund and a co-author of the report.
”The fact that the US ranks among countries that are involved in some form of conflict (whether that be civil war, general unrest, drug/arms trafficking etc) is really startling, and even more so when we look at where US states compare on the global scale,” he said in an email to The Washington Post. “I do think many Americans would be surprised by how similar our rates are to those in the world’s conflict zones.”
The report was based on data from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study, which provides an in-depth look at mortality and disability across countries, and the latest 2022 mortality data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers defined firearm mortality in the study as an aggregate of physical violence by firearm, self-harm by firearm and unintentional firearm injuries.
So far this year, there have been 24 mass killings with guns in the United States, according to a tracker published by The Washington Post, which defines a “mass killing” as an event in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrators.
Globally, the United States ranks in the 93rd percentile for overall firearm mortality, the 92nd percentile for firearm mortality among children and teenagers, and the 96th percentile for firearm mortality among women, the report found.
US states have a higher firearm mortality rate than most other countries in the world. Rates of self-harm are also much higher.
Black, American Indian and Alaska Native people experience the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.
Previous studies have compared firearm mortality in the United States with other high-income countries and showed consistently higher US death rates.
The aim of the latest report, Gumas said, was to highlight how the United States compares to countries that aren’t in its usual wealthy cohort – such as Belize, which is plagued by bouts of civil unrest and has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world.
”I think Americans recognise that we of course don’t compare to a lot of the high-income countries we typically compare ourselves to,” Gumas said.
“But I don’t think they would expect us to compare to many of the countries that we do compare to like the Dominican Republic, Belize, or Haiti.”
