Sarah Toy

USA TODAY

The United States is in a class of its own when it comes to gun homicides.

The U.S. saw on average 8,592 gun homicides each year — 2.7 gun homicides for every 100,000 people — between 2010 and 2015, according to the latest data from the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research initiative that tracks guns.

That’s more than five times the rate of neighboring Canada, with 0.5 per 100,000, and more than 10 times that of the Netherlands and France, with 0.2 per 100,000 people. Germany and Spain have an even lower rate, with 0.1 per 100,000 people.

The latest example of gun violence in America — a lone attacker in Las Vegas killed 59 people and injured over 500 in the worst mass shooting in the U.S. — has renewed the debate over gun laws in this country.

“When you look at all the other developed countries, they do better than we do,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and a professor of health policy at the university.

“I think it’s pretty clear: One of the big reasons for this is we have so many guns and such easy access to guns compared to everyone else,” he said.

Don Turner, president of the Nevada Firearms Coalition (NRC), the state’s NRA affiliate, told VICE News that someone like Los Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock who was bent on murder could always launch a shooting spree, regardless of any laws in place.

“In the emotion of the moment, there’s a tendency to push anti-gun agendas," he said. "We need to find out what really happened.”

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After 35 people were killed and 23 injured in a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government worked with political groups to institute legislation to restrict gun availability, including a buy-back program that reduced firearms in the country by 20%, he said.

"They haven’t had anything like what they experienced before in terms of mass shootings," said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama’s Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice.

Today, numbers in Australia are extraordinarily low, with 0.1 gun homicides per 100,000 people.