More Americans have died from guns since 1968 than in all the wars in US history. These charts show the scale of the problem

How bad is US gun violence? These charts show the scale of the problem

Gun violence in the US isn’t just bad, it’s uniquely bad in terms of the number of lives that are affected by it and how rare such violence is in a wealthy country. The charts below illustrate the scale of the problem.

1. The outlier

Other wealthy countries don’t have as many guns as the US. They don’t have as many gun deaths as the US, either.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest More guns, more deaths. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

Source: Small Arms Survey, 2007-2012

2. The cumulative number

Comparisons can help us to understand scale. Since 1968, when these figures were first collected, there have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths on US territory. Since the founding of the United States, there have been 1,396,733 war deaths. That figure includes American lives lost in the revolutionary war, the Mexican war, the civil war (Union and Confederate, estimate), the Spanish-American war, the first world war, the second world war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, as well as other conflicts, including in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Americans killed by guns and Americans killed by war. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1994 (gun death data), Congressional Research Service, 2010 (conflict deaths). Numbers updated by Politifact in 2015

3. The breakdown

When people think of gun violence, they might think of large-scale mass shootings like the one in Las Vegas on Sunday, in which 59 people were killed. But of the approximately 33,000 gun violence deaths that take place each year, only about 500 (or 1.5%) come from mass shootings. Two-thirds of gun violence deaths are from suicide.

What doesn’t this chart show? The more than 70,000 people who are injured by guns each year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How guns kill people. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012-14, FBI, 2014, Mother Jones, 2014, Global Terrorism Database, 2016