Better than Somalia: How to Feel Good About Gun Violence

Armed with Reason

We recently discussed a YouTube video entitled, “Number One With A Bullet”

 How Not To Compare International Homicide Rates

Unsurprisingly, the United States does indeed have a lower homicide rate than countries in the middle of civil war, run by despots, or struggling with crippling poverty. Should we really be patting ourselves on the back though that our homicide rate just barely beats out Yemen, number 109 on the list, and the fifth most dangerous country in the world? Should we be bragging that our country has less per capita murder than Somalia or Zimbabwe — countries that are literally run by warlords?

Comparing the U.S. with countries that have nothing in common only guarantees that whatever the true relationship between guns and homicide is, we won’t be able to find it.

Indeed, using Whittle’s methodology, you can make almost all of America’s problems disappear overnight by simply expanding our peer group. For example, our infant mortality rate is the highest among industrialized nations, but if we include all of the world’s countries in our comparison, including those where children regularly die from diarrhea and measles within a couple months of being born, we rank No. 34!


What A Valid Analysis Reveals

But that’s clearly not the appropriate way to think about public health problems. Serious academics restrict their analysis to countries that have attained a certain level of gross national income (GNI). This is extremely important because it enables researchers to control for confounding variables that may drive the homicide rate upwards, such as the presence of ethnic or religious conflict, or widespread poverty. One way to do this is by using the World Bank’s definition of a high-income OECD country. Thirty-one countries meet the criteria of a per capita GNI $12,616.

When academics further refine this list of countries using socio-economic factors they reveal a harrowing picture. Compared with other high-income countries, the United States has a homicide rate 6.9 times higher, a difference driven almost exclusively by firearm homicide rates that are 19.5 times higher. The same is true for firearm suicide and unintentional firearm death, for which the United States has rates that are 5.8 and 5.2 times higher, respectively, than other industrialized countries.

A 2013 study also showed that among the highest income countries “there was a significant positive correlation between guns per capita per country and the rate of firearm-related deaths.” A recent study in the American Journal of Medicine also showed that among the highest income countries, “there was a significant positive correlation between guns per capita per country and the rate of firearm-related deaths.” The authors concluded that: “the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.”

Research on female homicide victimization reveals an even more startling picture: the United States is the sole outlier in female homicide rates among high-income countries. Even though American females represent only 32 percent of the overall female population among industrialized nations, the United States accounts for 84 percent of all female firearm homicides.