On Christmas Day, in a bitter reminder that, unlike stores and offices, gun violence in America doesn’t stop during the holidays, 27 people were killed and 63 others were injured by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
As the Washington Post‘s Christopher Ingraham notes, as many people were killed by firearms in the United States on Christmas day this year as in all of Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland combined, in one year. That’s 27 people out of nearly 29 million people in a given year, compared to 27 people out of a possible 320 million in one day. Granted, no one was killed from guns in Bermuda, Hong Kong, or Iceland at all, and the fatalities and injuries on Christmas Day in the United States are actually fewer than on a typical day this year. But the comparison is a stark reminder that gun violence in America is a unique health crisis.
