This chart proves that the United States has failed at protecting its citizens from guns

(Javier Zarracina/Vox)

Everyone knows that gun deaths are way more common in the USthan in other developed countries. But the sheer scale of the discrepancy is hard to wrap your head around. The above chart illustrates the gap by showing how many lives would be saved, every year, if the US had the overall gun death rate of a peer country like the UK or Sweden, rather than the massive rate of gun homicides, suicides, and accidents we currently endure.

Reducing the US gun death rate to European levels would be very, very difficult. But gun researchers have found a strong correlation between the number of guns in a country and its rate of gun deaths, and Australia has had some success in reducing gun deaths by confiscating and destroying guns. Of course, whether reforms that dramatic could ever pass in the US is another question entirely.

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