How The U.S. Compares With Other Countries In Deaths From Gun Violence

By Nurith Aizenman,

Published August 5, 2019 at 2:29 PM EDT

Editor's note: This is an updated version of a story that was published on Nov. 9, 2018.

The United States has the 28th-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 4.43 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017 — far greater than what is seen in other wealthy countries.

On a state-by-state calculation, the rates can be even higher. In the District of Columbia, the rate is 16.34 per 100,000 — the highest in the United States. In Louisiana, the rate is 10.68 per 100,000. In Texas and Ohio — the scene of two mass shootings at the beginning of August — the rates are close to the national average: 4.74 per 100,000 in Texas and 4.60 in Ohio.

And the national rate of gun violence in the U.S. is higher than in many low-income countries.

Those findings are part of the latest version of an annual report on gun violence from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks lives lost in every country, in every year, by every possible cause of death.

The 2017 figures also paint a fairly rosy picture for much of the rest of the world. Deaths from gun violence are rare even in many countries that are extremely poor — such as Bangladesh, which saw 0.07 deaths per 100,000 people.

Prosperous Asian countries such as Singapore and Japan boast the absolute lowest rates, though the United Kingdom and Germany are in almost as good shape.

"It is a little surprising that a country like ours should have this level of gun violence," Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health and epidemiology at the IHME, told NPR. "If you compare us to other well-off countries, we really stand out."

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To be sure, there are quite a few countries where gun violence is a substantially larger problem than in the United States — particularly in Central America and the Caribbean. Mokdad said a major driver is the large presence of gangs and drug trafficking. "The gangs and drug traffickers fight among themselves to get more territory, and they fight the police," said Mokdad. And citizens who are not involved are often caught in the crossfire. Another country with widespread gun violence is Venezuela, which has been grappling with political unrest and an economic meltdown.

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Mokdad said drug trafficking may also be a driving factor in two Asian countries that have unusually high rates of violent gun deaths for their region, the Philippines and Thailand.

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With the casualties due to armed conflicts factored out, even in conflict-ridden regions such as the Middle East, the U.S. rate is worse.

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The U.S. gun violence death rate is also higher than in nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including many that are among the world's poorest.

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One more way to consider these data: The institute also estimates what it would expect a country's rate of gun violence deaths to be based solely on its socioeconomic status. By that measure, the U.S. should be seeing only 0.46 deaths per 100,000 people. (That is comparable to the rate in Canada, where the statistic is 0.47 deaths per 100,000.)

Instead, the actual U.S. rate of 4.43 deaths per 100,000 is almost 10 times as high. And it is 29 times as high as in Denmark, which had 0.15 deaths per 100,000.