Story highlights An Indian teen died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while taking a selfie

Since 2014, dozens of people reportedly died as a result of some sort of accident involving a selfie

The most dangerous places to take a self-portrait seem to be high places or in water

It pops up in the news from time to time: the death-by-selfie. Earlier this year, for example, a teenager in India was struck and killed while trying to take a picture of himself in front of an oncoming train. Now the economics site Priceonomics has attempted to gather the existing statistics about the people who've lost their lives while taking selfies, combing through three years of news reports indicating a death was "precipitated by a selfie," or that a person had died while attempting to take a photo of themselves.

What they found was sobering: Since 2014, 49 people had been reported dead as a result of some sort of accident involving a selfie. (And this is likely an underestimate, as not every selfie-related death was probably reported in the media.) More than a quarter of selfie-related deaths, perhaps unsurprisingly, are concentrated among 21-year-olds, and 75 percent are male.

In terms of where in the world these selfie-related deaths occur, the data is skewed heavily toward India, where 19 of the reported selfie-related deaths — or 40 percent of the total sample — occurred. And while it would be easy to say that India's higher population has something to do with the bloated number, that doesn't appear to entirely explain it. India's higher-than-average drowning rate has a huge role to play, and one that's garnered government attention, to the point where the country has declared 16 no-selfie zones . And India's not the first country to try to address this issue: Russia has created a campaign illustrating bad selfie ideas to discourage risky self-portraits from cliffs, mountaintops, or near wild animals, among other dangerous options.

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