Death rates from firearms in some US states are comparable to conflict zones, research shows

Rachel Pannett
| WashingtonPost

The number of gun deaths in several US states is comparable to places around the world experiencing civil unrest or bloody turf wars, a new report shows.

The report, published Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group, found that Mississippi’s total number of gun deaths was nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean country where violent gangs control large swaths of the country and whose president was assassinated by gunmen in 2021.

Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama also had higher gun death rates than Mexico, where rival drug cartels are locked in bloody conflict. Montana’s gun death rate was higher than in Colombia, where drug trafficking is widespread.

Wyoming, Arizona and Oklahoma all rank above Brazil. New Jersey’s suburbs had a higher gun death rate than Nicaragua, Mali and Djibouti.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis, putting it on par with a 1960s warning about the deadly consequences of cigarette smoking.

The latest report illustrates “how bad gun violence has become in the US and that it is something we should be talking about 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 is among the countries involved in some form of conflict (be it civil war, general unrest, drug/arms trafficking, etc.) is truly startling, and even more so when we look at where American states relate to each other. on a global scale,” he said in an email to The Washington Post. “I think many Americans would be surprised if our numbers were comparable 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 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers defined firearm mortality in the study as a sum of physical violence from firearms, self-harm from firearms, and unintentional firearm injuries.

So far this year, there have been 24 mass murders involving guns in the United States, according to a tracker published by The Washington Post, which defines a “mass murder” as an event in which four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrators. .

Globally, the United States ranks at the 93rd percentile for overall firearm deaths, the 92nd percentile for firearm deaths among children and teens, and the 96th percentile for firearm deaths among women, the report found.

US states have a higher firearm death rate than most other countries in the world. The percentage of self-harm is 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 have consistently shown higher death rates in the US.

The purpose of the latest report, Gumas said, was to highlight how the United States compares to countries that are not in the usual affluent cohort — such as Belize, which has been plagued by bouts of civil unrest and one of the highest murder rates per capita of the population knows. rates in the world.

“I think Americans recognize that we obviously don’t compare to many of the high-income countries that we typically compare ourselves to,” Gumas said. “But I don’t think they expect us to compare ourselves to many of the countries we do compare to, like the Dominican Republic, Belize or Haiti.”