Americans much more likely to be killed by guns than people from other countries

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/02/03/americans-are-much-much-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-guns-than-people-in-other-countries/?tid=sm_fb

When nine people are gunned down at an Oregon community college, or 14 people fatally shot at a holiday party in California, or nine parishioners killed at a church in Charleston, the world pays attention. These bursts of violence are terrifying and specific, mass killings of the sort that can break through what is otherwise the grim, pervasive background noise of gun violence in America. This daily parade of shootings and killings can capture local attention and live in brief segments on the news and frighten communities and they otherwise come and go without much public notice.

How unusual is this, though? How does it actually compare to life in other countries? Researchers recently decided to see, using the World Health Organization’s 2010 mortality data to compare rates in the United States with those found in other populous, high-income countries.

The numbers they found suggest that a person is much, much more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in any of these other countries, and it isn’t remotely close. The gun homicide rate in the United States was more than 25 times higher than in other high-income countries, according to a new study in the American Journal of Medicine that examined death rates per 100,000 people.

In the United States, the overall homicide rate is seven times higher than these other countries, while the homicide rate when discounting guns was 2.7 times higher, the study said.