The latest report illustrates “how much gun violence has grown in the United States and how it’s something we should be talking about much more than we are,” said Evan Gumas, a research associate at the Fund of the Commonwealth and co-author of the report. .

“The fact that the United States ranks itself among the countries involved in some form of conflict (whether civil war, general unrest, drug or arms trafficking, etc.) is really surprising, and even more so when we look at the comparison between American states. globally,” he said in an email to The Washington Post. “I think many Americans would be surprised to see how similar our rates are to those in conflict zones around the world.”

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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States.

Researchers defined firearm mortality in the study as a composite of physical firearm violence, firearm self-harm, and unintentional firearm injury.

So far this year, there have been 24 gun killings in the United States, according to a tracker released by The Washington Postwhich defines a “massacre” as an event in which four or more people die, 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 adolescents, and the 96th percentile for firearm mortality. fire in women, according to the report.

U.S. states have a higher gun death rate than most other countries in the world. Rates of self-harm are also much higher.

Blacks, American Indians, and Alaska Natives experience the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

Previous studies have compared firearm mortality in the United States with that of other high-income countries and have shown consistently higher mortality rates in the United States.

The goal of the latest report, Gumas said, was to highlight how the United States compares to countries that are not part of the group. its usual cohort of wealthy people – like 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 are of course not comparable to a lot of the high-income countries that we usually compare ourselves to,” Gumas said.

“But I don’t think they would expect us to compare ourselves to many of the countries we compare ourselves to, like the Dominican Republic or Belize or Haiti.”