America Stands Out In Shooting Deaths
Two campers were sleeping in Yosemite Valley in California this August when a tree branch snapped and fell on their tent, killing them both. “We don’t know what caused the limb to fall,” said the park’s spokeswoman, Jodi Bailey. “It seems like just a freak accident.”
Ms. Bailey was right: Being killed by a falling object is extremely rare. On average, about 680 Americans each year die this way, or about two people per million.
Yet in other developed countries, there is another cause of death that is just as rare: homicide by gun.
In Germany, for example, about two out of every million people are fatally shot by another person each year — making such events as uncommon there as the campers’ deaths in Yosemite. Gun homicides are just as rare in several other European countries, including the Netherlands and Austria. In the United States, two per million is roughly the death rate for hypothermia or plane crashes.
In Poland and England, only about one out of every million people die in gun homicides each year — about as often as an American dies in an agricultural accident or falling from a ladder. In Japan, where gun homicides are even rarer, the likelihood of dying this way is roughly one in 10 million.
In the United States, the death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people. The homicides include losses from mass shootings, like those on December 2 in San Bernardino, California, and on November 27 in Colorado Springs. And of course, they also include the country’s vastly more common single-victim killings.
These comparisons help highlight how exceptional the United States is. In America, where the right to bear arms is cherished by much of the population, gun homicides are a significant public health concern. For men 15 to 29, they are the third leading cause of death, after accidents and suicides. In other high-income countries, gun homicides are unusual events. The recent Paris attacks killed 130 people, which is nearly as many as die from gun homicides in all of France in a typical year. But even if France had a mass shooting as deadly as the Paris attacks every month, its annual rate of gun homicide would be lower than that in the United States.
Our gun homicide numbers come from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss nonprofit affiliated with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and represent the average gun homicide death rates in those countries between 2007 and 2012. Our United States death rates come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over those same years. We focused on the rates of gun homicides; the overall rate of gun deaths is substantially higher, because suicides make up a majority of gun deaths in the United States and are also higher than in other developed countries.
The statistics are not meant to make light of rare causes of death. Instead, we use them as a way to help think meaningfully about the differences among gun death rates.
The rate of gun violence in the United States is not the highest in the world. In parts of Central America, Africa and the Middle East, the gun death rates are even higher. In neighboring Mexico, where a drug war rages, 122 people per million die in a gun homicide.
But the countries with those levels of gun violence are not like the United States in many ways, including life expectancy and education. Among developed democracies, the United States is an outlier.