FOR more than 500 years guns have been responsible for meting out violence. A new paper published in JAMA, a medical journal, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington provides perhaps the best global estimates to date of how severe that violence is. The paper finds that in 2016 alone some 250,000 people were killed by guns (the study excludes deaths from war and at the hands of police). In total, between 1990 and 2016, some 6.5m people were killed by firearms, greater than the number that succumbed to typhoid fever or alcohol-related deaths.

The new data show that gun violence is extremely concentrated. Just 15 countries—representing 35% of the world’s population—account for 75% of all gun deaths. While India is reckoned to have suffered 26,000 gun deaths in 2016, its firearm death rate, at 2.6 per 100,000 people, is 25% lower than the global average. Gun violence is worst in the Americas: in El Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela, it exceeds 30 firearm deaths per 100,000 people, the vast majority of it murderous.

In 90 countries more people are killed by guns in suicides than in murders. In America, twice as many people killed themselves with a gun in 2016 than were murdered by one. Germany had fewer than 100 gun murders in 2016 but suffered from around 1,000 gun-related suicides. It is not all grim reading. Overall, per head of population, firearm deaths are decreasing, largely because suicide is becoming less prevalent.