Study Finds Violence Claims 526,000 Lives a Year

Murder victims outnumber victims of war by a ratio of seven to one.

While the homicide rate might be plumbing record lows here in Canada, around the world murder is responsible for 396,000 deaths a year, far more than the number of people killed in wars, according to a broad new study. The Global Burden of Violence report for 2011 found that worldwide, some 526,000 people meet violent deaths each year, and that the vast majority of those come in the form of murder. Wars pick off only 55,000 people a year, which is way down from just 70 short years ago, while another 54,000 die from "unintentional violence" and some 21,000 are killed in "police operations," which covers both cops and civilians. The average death rate around the planet is 7.9 murder victims per 100,000 people, although 14 countries had rates higher than 30 victims per 100,000. Here in Canada, the rate is under 2 per 100,000, but in Mexico's Chihuahua state, the rate hit a whopping 129 per 100,000 due to its ongoing drug wars. All told, those 14 countries, which also included Jamaica, Congo, Sudan, El Salvador, Colombia account for just five per cent of the world's population but are home to a quarter of all violent deaths.