Americans really like their guns. They own 42% of 650 million civilian firearms worldwide

Kim Hjelmgaard | USA TODAY

Texas (26), Las Vegas (59), Orlando (49), Virginia Tech (32), Newtown (26) — the number of people killed in mass shootings in the United States is growing.

With each incident comes renewed debate on the topic of guns: ownership rates, ease of access, how many people are dying, what needs to be done. While comparisons to other countries are imperfect, here's a look at how the U.S. stacks up against other countries.

Big on guns

The Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research group, estimates national gun ownership rates range from a high of 90 firearms per every 100 people in the U.S., to one firearm or less for every 100 residents in South Korea and Ghana.

Yemen, the country with the second highest number of firearms per 100 people — 55 — is one of the Arab world's poorest countries and is fighting a bloody civil war. Americans own 42% of about 650 million civilian firearms worldwide, according to the Small Arms Survey.

More: How U.S. compares to rest of world when it comes to gun homicides

Super-size homicide

The U.S. has more gun deaths per capita than any of the world’s two dozen highest-income countries, according to research by David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Using mortality data from the World Health Organization, Hemenway found that firearms-related homicide deaths were 25 times higher in the U.S. than in other high income countries such as Austria, France and Finland. For those aged 15-24, the gun homicide rate in the U.S. was 49 times higher. Approximately 300 Americans are shot every day in the U.S. and 100 die from gunshot wounds in murders, attempted suicides or accidents, according to Hemenway.

More: Harrowing moments inside Texas church: Gunman shouted 'everybody die,' fired at crying children

In the European Union, which has a population of 740 million — more than double the U.S. — 18 people die on average each day as a result of gun shot wounds, but 75% of these are suicides, according to the Flemish Peace Institute, a research organization.

The Small Arms Survey found that between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. averaged 8,592 gun homicides each year — more than five times the rate of neighboring Canada.

Doing the math on mass shootings

The U.S. has more mass shootings than any other country in the world, according to a study last year led by criminal justice professor Adam Lankford of the University of Alabama. A mass shooting is defined as involving four or more people. Lankford studied mass shootings in 171 countries and found that between 1966-2012 at least a third of them took place in the U.S. In 2016, there were 383 mass shootings in the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive, an online research tool. The year before that, 333.

In his study, Lankford found that there was a correlation between the number of mass shootings in a country and high rates of gun ownership.

Since 2006, USA TODAY has tracked a total of 358 mass killings that have claimed the lives of 1,883 people. The cases include shootings, stabbings, fires and blunt-force attacks, among others, in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Australian rules

A decade ago, after a lone gunman killed 35 people with a semiautomatic weapon at a popular tourist spot in Tasmania, Australian authorities announced sweeping reforms to the nation's gun laws. Civilians were no longer permitted to own rapid-fire weapons, ownership rules were tightened and two large-scale, federally-funded gun buyback programs were introduced that removed weapons from Australia's streets.

The clampdown appears to have worked. Twenty years later, there have been no fatal mass shootings in the country, according to a study published in June last year by researchers at the University of Sydney. In the 18 years before the shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia that claimed 104 lives, according to Simon Chapman, one of the lead researchers of the study.

The number of firearms in private ownership has also steadily declined. In 1994, 16% of Australians households had guns. By 2005, the figure had fallen 6.2%, according to GunPolicy.org, a guns-related research tool run by the University of Sydney.

Reacting to the shooting in Las Vegas on Monday, President Trump said "we'll be talking about gun laws as time goes by." Earlier this year, he rolled back legislation during Obama's administration that would have made it hard for people with mental illnesses to buy a gun.