Los Angeles Times

In some countries, the odds of getting shot are 1 in a million. In the US, it's 1,000 times higher

Imagine that, in the course of a single year, a ubiquitous household item was implicated in the death of every man, woman and child in the city of Glendale, Ariz., America's 87th largest city with a population of 251,269. The world would almost certainly take notice of such a loss.

That, in essence, was the global toll of humanity's obsession with firearms.

There are roughly 1 billion guns in the world, and new research finds that in 2016, they ended the lives of about 251,000 people in 195 countries and territories that kept reasonably detailed death records. Those deaths included homicides, suicides and

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