Tuesday, June 14, 2016
[The] level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.We can take cold comfort in the gun death rates in El Salvador and Mexico, which are considerably higher than ours. But Chile's rate is less than half what ours is, and Israel's is a quarter our rate.
Around the world, those countries have substantially lower rates of deaths from gun homicide. In Germany, being murdered with a gun is as uncommon as being killed by a falling object in the United States. About two people out of every million are killed in a gun homicide. 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 about the same as an American’s chance of being killed by lightning — roughly one in 10 million.
Tags: Gun violence , Gun homicide rates