Advocates for tougher gun control can, sadly, now bolster their calls for new laws by using the tragic new statistics, which are based on an enormous database maintained by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks how many die in every country each year and the cause.
The numbers show that in 2016, there were 3.85 US deaths per 100,000 people due to gun violence, the 31st highest rate in the world, 32 times higher than Germany, which had 0.12 deaths per 100,000, and 55 times higher than the UK, which had 0.07 deaths per 100,000.
Prosperous Asian states boasted the absolute lowest rates of gun violence: only 0.05 deaths in South Korea, 0.04 in Japan and 0.03 in Singapore.
But for the US, gun violence continues to be an endemic and deadly problem, even compared to extremely poor nations such as Bangladesh and Laos.
"It is a little surprising that a country like ours should have this level of gun violence," said Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health and epidemiology at the IHME, cited by NPR.
"If you compare us to other well-off countries, we really stand out."
And not in a good way, either.
