Six countries, half the gun deaths
Together, these countries have less than 10% of the world’s population, yet they accounted for just over half of all firearm-related deaths in 2016.
IStatistics show guns typically kill people — men overwhelmingly — who are in the prime of life, between the ages of 15 and 40. In 2016, magine that, in the course of a single year, a ubiquitous household item was implicated in the death of every man, woman and child in the city of Glendale, Arizona, America’s 87th largest city with a population of 251,269. The world would almost certainly take notice of such a loss.
That, in essence, was the global toll of humanity’s obsession with firearms. The new worldwide tally is a firstever attempt to discern international patterns in gun access, gun ownership and fatalities caused by guns. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The research team, a multinational consortium of public health experts called the Global Burden of Disease 2016 Injury Collaborators, estimated that there were 209,000 firearms deaths in 1990 — a figure that rose to 251,000 in 2016. But the global population expanded more rapidly during that period. As a result, between 1990 and 2016, worldwide rates of gun deaths decreased by close to 1 per cent per year.
Wars, mass shootings and terrorist attacks may loom large in our consciousness. But the new work makes clear that guns’ worldwide death toll actually is driven by personal despair, interpersonal conflict and carelessness.
“This constitutes a major public health problem for humanity,” a trio of firearms-research specialists wrote in an editorial that accompanies the new study.
Across national boundaries with differing laws and wildly varying attitudes toward guns, the findings raise many questions for researchers to pursue. But they make one point clearly: Firearms are “an important public health problem with social and economic costs that extend ■ 126, 990 124,010 beyond the immediate loss of life,” the study authors wrote.
Other research has found a link between firearms ownership and fatal “non-stranger” violence in the United States. The authors of the new report noted that “although men are most often the targets of firearm violence, they are also the most likely perpetrators, often in the context of domestic and relationship violence.” In Australia, Canada and Germany, gun-related suicides typically outnumbered homicides by sizeable margins. of gun-related deaths worldwide considered a homicide.
The study also makes clear that the United States has played a key role in setting the stage for gun-related deaths across the Americas, both by supplying the weapons and sustaining the drug trade that drives the mostly illegal use of guns in these countries. In many of these countries, few guns appear to be in the hands of legal owners.
By creating national baselines of gun deaths and showing trends over time, the new tally lays the foundation for cross-cultural comparisons. That could allow future researchers to explore why gun deaths have dropped so dramatically in some countries while rising in others, and to ask whether government policies played a role. It will permit them to study whether and how the circumstances of countries such as gun behemoth the United States subvert or promote a country’s efforts to drive down gun deaths.
It should also spur more and better data collection. “In addition to knowing how many people own guns, reliable estimates of how many people have easy access to guns would be valuable because this may be the strongest risk factor for firearm injury and death,” wrote University of Washington paediatrician Dr. Frederick P. Rivara, Stanford Law School’s David M. Studdert, and UC Davis emergency physician Dr. Garen J. Wintemute.
They added that future research must begin to explain why people keep firearms.
“Efforts to prevent firearm violence that do not proceed from a clear understanding of both why people own firearms and the perceived barriers to change will have limited success, as the experience to date demonstrates.”