Crime Killing Far More Than War: Study

You’re a lot more likely to be shot by a criminal than by an enemy combatant, according to a new international study. Crime is a drastically larger source of armed violence than war, the 2011 Global Burden of Armed Violence report concludes. Of the 526,000 people killed violently each year, only about 55,000 die in war—only slightly more than the 54,000 who die in accidental violent deaths, the AP reports.

The rest is mostly crime, with Latin America and parts of Africa seeing the worst violence. “Most of the states that are worst affected by armed violence are not at war,” one report author said. El Salvador, Iraq, and Jamaica had the worst violence, but certain parts of other countries were even worse—Mexico’s Chihuahua state, for example, had a violent death rate of 129 per 100,000 people, thanks to drug gangs. That is “greater than almost any war zone that we can find on the planet.” (More gun violence stories.)