In 2017, U.S. civilians held an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the highest rate in the world by a factor of more than two.
January has been another month of devastating gun violence in the United States, as a string of mass shootings impacted communities in California. The headlines have become all too familiar for Americans, who have endured a seemingly endless slew of firearm-related violence in recent years.
Indeed, the U.S. continues to set itself apart from its international peers in terms of gun ownership and firearm deaths.
In 2017, U.S. civilians held an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the highest rate in the world by a factor of more than two, followed by Yemen (52.8), Montenegro (39.1), Serbia (39.1) and Uruguay (34.7), according to data from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project located at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. In other words: The United States was the only country with more civilian-held guns than citizens.
Reports in recent years have also shown the U.S. to have among the world’s highest rates of gun-related deaths, including through interpersonal violence, self-harm and unintentional injuries.
Among 204 countries analyzed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the U.S. came in 20th for the highest rate of firearm deaths in 2019. Americans died due to firearms at a rate of 11.3 per 100,000 people that year.
Among the 40 largest countries in the world in 2019, the United States ranked fourth after Colombia, Brazil and Mexico in terms of having the highest rate of deaths due to firearms. From 2014 to 2020, gun-related deaths in the U.S. rose 35%, according to nonpartisan data center USAFacts.
Suicide, with LGBTQ Americans and American Indian and Alaska Native populations among groups particularly at risk, is a significant contributor to the prevalence of firearm-related death. According to the IHME data, 7.1 out of 100,000 Americans died by firearm-assisted suicide in 2019. This represents the second-highest rate in the world after only Greenland, and no other countries had a rate higher than 5.0 per 100,000 people. By comparison, the American fatality rate for interpersonal gun violence was 4.0 per 100,000 people, and the rate of unintentional death by firearm was 0.2 per 100,000.
As gun-related deaths rose from 2014 to 2020, so did U.S. firearm background checks, increasing by 89%. In 2022, background checks dipped back down to pre-pandemic levels, but the 2022 total of 30.8 million remains 48% higher than in 2014.

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