Gun death rates in some U.S. states comparable to conflict zones, study finds

The rate of firearms deaths in several U.S. states is similar to their frequency in places around the world that are battling civil unrest or bloody gang wars, a new report shows.

The report, published Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group, found that the overall rate of firearms deaths in Mississippi was nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation where violent gangs control large swaths of the country and whose president was assassinated by gunmen in 2021.

Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama also had higher firearms death rates than Mexico, where rival drug cartels are engaged in bloody conflict. Montana’s death rate from guns was higher than in Colombia, where drug trafficking is rife.

Wyoming, Arizona and Oklahoma all ranked above Brazil. Suburban New Jersey had a higher gun death rate than Nicaragua, Mali and Djibouti.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis - putting it on a par with a 1960s warning on the lethal consequences of cigarette smoking.

The latest report illustrates “just how bad gun violence has gotten in the U.S. and how it’s something we should be talking about far more than we do,” said Evan Gumas, a research associate at the Commonwealth Fund and a co-author of the report.

“The fact that the U.S. ranks among countries that are involved in some form of conflict (whether that be civil war, general unrest, drug/arms trafficking etc.) is really startling, and even more so when we look at where U.S. states compare on the global scale,” he said in an email to The Washington Post. “I do think many Americans would be surprised by how similar our rates are to those in the world’s conflict zones.”

The report was based on data from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study, which provides an in-depth look at mortality and disability across countries, and the latest 2022 mortality data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers defined firearm mortality in the study as an aggregate of physical violence by firearm, self-harm by firearm and unintentional firearm injuries.

So far this year, there have been 24 mass killings with guns in the United States, according to a tracker published by The Washington Post, which defines a “mass killing” as an event in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrators.

Globally, the United States ranks in the 93rd percentile for overall firearm mortality, the 92nd percentile for firearm mortality among children and teenagers, and the 96th percentile for firearm mortality among women, the report found.

U.S. states have a higher firearm mortality rate than most other countries in the world. Rates of self-harm are also much higher. Black, American Indian and Alaska Native people experience the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

Previous studies have compared firearm mortality in the United States with other high-income countries and showed consistently higher U.S. death rates.

The aim of the latest report, Gumas said, was to highlight how the United States compares to countries that aren’t in its usual wealthy cohort - such as Belize, which is plagued by bouts of civil unrest and has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world.

“I think Americans recognize that we of course don’t compare to a lot of the high-income countries we typically compare ourselves to,” Gumas said. “But I don’t think they would expect us to compare to many of the countries that we do compare to like the Dominican Republic, Belize, or Haiti.”