Yes, Americans are often shot—and so are many others
- Harvard Injury Control Research Centre, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Correspondence to: Philip Alpers; palpers{at}hsph.harvard.edu
The public health community is crucial to any solution
This journal often publishes papers on gun injury, almost all of them American. Readers on other shores could be forgiven for asking if the topic concerns them, given the sharp disparities in firearm related mortality. For example in the United States, 4% of the world population possesses 50% of the planet's privately owned firearms1,2; America's gun death rate stands head and shoulders above those of 35 similar high and upper middle income nations.3 Of the 35, 29 suffer less than half the firearm related death rate in the United States.
Despite a recent spike in drug related shootings in a handful of cities including London, a resident of England or Wales remains 26 times less likely to die by gunshot than an American. In Japan, the risk of gun death is at least 100 times lower than in the United States.
Yet America is far from …
