From PolitiFact:
Two shootings. Three days. Eighteen people dead. California is reeling from two mass shootings: one in Monterey Park on Jan. 21 that killed 11 people, and another one in Half Moon Bay on Jan. 24 that killed seven.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., bemoaned the level of gun violence in the U.S. and blamed Republicans for opposing gun restrictions.
“Every country struggles with mental illness. But the USA has a gun homicide rate 26 TIMES HIGHER than our peers,” Newsom tweetedJan. 23. “The difference is how the @GOP have bowed down to the gun industry. The difference is how easy it is to access to (sic) guns and high capacity magazines in our country.”
We’ve heard similar claims before and wanted to check out Newsom’s statistic.
Newsom’s office directed us to a data analysis from the gun advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. The group, a project of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, compared gun homicide rates for 29 high-income countries and found the United States’ rate is 26 times higher than the average of the other countries. Everytown used data from GunPolicy.org at the University of Sydney School of Public Health.
In 2019, the year used by Everytown, the U.S. had a gun homicide rate of 4.38 per 100,000 people. The next high-income country on the list was Chile, with a rate of less than 1 per 100,000. (The U.S. gun homicide rate rose to 5.9 in 2020, the Centers for Disease and Prevention reported.)
Mexico’s gun homicide rate is higher than the U.S.’, but the World Bank does not consider Mexico as high-income. …
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