The study shows that gun death rates in some US states are lower than in conflict zones

The latest report illustrates “how bad gun violence has gotten in the U.S. and how we should be speaking up a lot more than we are,” said Evan Gumas, research associate at the Commonwealth Fund and co-author of the report. .

“The fact that the US ranks among countries that are involved in some form of conflict (be it civil war, general unrest, drug/arms trafficking, etc.) is truly surprising, and even more so when we look where do the american states compare. on a global scale,” he said in an email to The Washington Post. “I think many Americans would be surprised at how similar our rates are to conflict zones around the world.”

The report was based on data from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study, which provides an in-depth look at mortality and disability in countries, and the latest 2022 mortality data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers defined firearm mortality in the study as an aggregate of physical violence by firearm, self-inflicted firearm injury, and unintentional firearm injury.

So far this year, there have been 24 mass shootings with guns in the United States, according to a tracker published by the The Washington Postwhich defines a “mass killing” as an event in which four or more people die, not including the perpetrators.

Globally, the United States ranks in the 93rd percentile for total firearm mortality, the 92nd percentile for child and adolescent firearm mortality, and the 96th percentile for firearm mortality among women, the report shows.

The US has a higher gun death rate than most other countries in the world. Rates of self-harm are also much higher.

Blacks, American Indians, and Alaska Natives face the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

Previous studies have compared firearm mortality in the United States to other high-income countries and have shown consistently higher US death rates.

The purpose of the latest report, Gumas said, was to highlight how the United States compares to countries that are not 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 recognize that we certainly don’t compare to many of the high-income countries that 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 compare ourselves to, like the Dominican Republic, Belize or Haiti.”