A new report from the Commonwealth Fund, which also recently released a report on the piss-poor state of American healthcare, found that some U.S. states have death rates from firearms on par with nations experiencing active conflict.
In fact, 6 of the 10 worst places on Earth for gun-related deaths are either U.S. territories or states: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have gun death rates even higher than in countries the media and people online like to label as violent cesspools. Namely, those three states have more gun-related deaths than Haiti and Mexico. Mississippi has a gun death rate of 28.5 deaths per year per 100,000 people. According to the Commonwealth Fund, that’s almost double the firearm death rate in Haiti, where gang wars push people to starvation.
Videos by VICE
On the whole, the United States ranks in the 93rd percentile globally for firearm mortality, with an astonishing 13.5 deaths per 100,000 people. So many people die from gun-related incidents in the United States that even parts of the country with the lowest rates—like Rhode Island, which only has 3 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people—still outpace countries like the UK and France. The chances of a child dying in the U.S. because of a firearm are 72 times higher than children in the UK.
One small silver lining in the report is that violent crime rates have decreased in recent years. That tiny little bit of good news is immediately undercut by the fact that over half of firearm-related deaths in the U.S. can be attributed to suicide. But this points to a larger theme: the basic prevalence of easily accessible guns in the United States is a problem.
Of course, no study about the United States would be incomplete without mentioning that the major problem at hand disproportionately affects minority groups: Black Americans experience the highest rates of gun deaths.
