Study finds gun death rates in some states are comparable to conflict zones

A new report shows that gun death rates in several U.S. states are similar to those in places around the world that are grappling with civil unrest or bloody gang wars.

A report released Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group, said Mississippi’s overall gun death rate was nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean country where violent gangs control large swaths of the country and whose president was killed by gunmen in 2021.

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

Wyoming, Arizona and Oklahoma were ranked above Brazil. New Jersey’s suburbs have higher gun death rates than Nicaragua, Mali and Djibouti.

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

The latest report illustrates “just how serious gun violence has become in the U.S. and that we should be talking about it a lot more than we are,” said Evan Goumas, a fellow 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, civil unrest, drug/weapons trafficking, etc.) is truly astounding, and even more so if we look at what US states are compared to. 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 those in conflict zones around the world.”

The report is based on data from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study, which provides an in-depth analysis of mortality and disability across countries, as well as the latest 2022 mortality data provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In their study, the researchers defined gun mortality as a composite of physical gun violence, gun-related self-harm, and unintentional gunshot injuries.

There have been 24 gun mass killings in the United States this year, according to a tracker published by The Washington Post, which defines a “mass killing” as an event in which four or more people, not including the perpetrators, are killed. .

Globally, the report says, the United States ranks in the 93rd percentile for overall gun deaths, 92nd percentile for gun deaths among children and adolescents, and 96th percentile for gun deaths among women.

US states have higher gun death rates than most other countries in the world. The rate of self-harm is also much higher. Blacks, American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

Previous studies have compared gun deaths in the United States with other high-income countries and have found consistently higher death rates in the United States.

According to Goumas, the purpose of the latest report was to highlight how the United States compares to countries outside of it is the usual wealthy cohort – such as Belize, which suffers from bouts of civil unrest and has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world.

“I think Americans realize that we certainly cannot compare with many of the high-income countries that we typically compare ourselves to,” Goumas said. “But I don’t think they expect us to be compared to a lot of the countries we compare to, like the Dominican Republic or Belize or Haiti.”