From PolitiFact:
The day after six people died in a mass shooting at a Chesapeake, Virginia, Walmart, Del. Cliff Hayes Jr., D-Chesapeake, said the nation must discuss why it has so many “homicides and handgun killings.”
“When you compare us here in this country to the European Union, we’re something like 23 times more likely for these incidents to occur here,” he said during a Nov. 23 interview on CNN.
We fact-checked Hayes’ statistic and found it’s essentially correct. He was referring to a May 2022 report published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
The institute compared the 2019 homicide rates from firearms — not just handguns, as Hayes said — between countries across the globe. Among the findings is that the firearm homicide rate in the U.S. was 22 times larger than in the European Union as a whole. (The institute does not calculate worldwide homicides from handguns, and we were unable to find such figures).
The U.S. firearm homicide rate in 2019 was 4.11 people per 100,000, compared with 0.19 in the 27-nation European Union. Bulgaria had the EU’s highest firearms homicide rate 0.56 per 100,000 — more than seven times lower than the U.S. …
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