Mississippi has the highest rate of gun deaths of any U.S. state, according to a new report.
With a gun death rate per capita at 18.23 deaths per 100,000 people, Mississippi has the highest number of deaths from firearms relative to the population, followed by Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.
This report was authored by personal injury lawyers Scott Vicknair, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and reveals the rate of gun deaths—not including suicides—across all U.S. states.
A map of the data reveals the distribution of the states with the highest rate of gun deaths per capita.
Mississippi had 536 gun deaths in 2022 across a population of 2.9 million. The state with the second-highest rate of deaths, Lousinia, had 759 deaths over a population of 4.6 million in 2022, giving it a rate of 16.54 deaths per 100,000 people.
In third place came Alabama, with a rate of 12.67 deaths per 100,000, and a total number of deaths of 643 across 5 million people. Fourth was New Mexico, with a smaller population of 2.1 million and 250 deaths, with a gun death rate of 11.83 per 100,000 population.
Missouri, having the largest population among the top five states at 6.1 million, has the lowest gun death rate per capita at 10.81 per 100,000 population. This suggests that while the absolute number of deaths is high, the problem is less intense on a per capita basis compared to the other states in the top five.
The remainder of the top 10 were Georgia at 10.05 gun deaths per 100,000, Arkansas at 9.92, South Carolina at 9.90, Illinois at 8.79, and Tennessee at 8.69 per 100,000.
The ten states with the lowest rate of gun deaths per population were: Vermont at 2.01 per 100,000, Iowa at 1.75, Wyoming at 1.72, Massachusetts at 1.50, Utah at 1.42, Idaho at 1.34, New Hampshire at 1.29, Rhode Island at 1.28, Hawaii at 1.04, and finally, Maine at 0.94 gun deaths per 100,000 people.
Some states had a much higher total number of deaths from guns—notably, California with 1,772, Texas with 1,973, Florida with 1,236, and Illinois with 1,106—but these have lower rates per capita due to their larger populations.
"While some states can be more or less accepting than others with guns in the U.S., it's interesting to see where these hotspots for gun deaths are. Many states featured in this list are in the south of the nation, and while these numbers at first glance may seem low, the difference between even the states in first and tenth on this list is concerning," a spokesperson for Scott Vicknair said in a statement.
This data—which shows a total of 20,254 deaths across all states in 2022—does not include people who used a gun to end their own lives.
According to the CDC, in 2021, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., 20,958 of which were homicides (43 percent), and 26,328 of which were suicides (54 percent), while 549 more were down to accidents, 537 involved law enforcement, and 458 had undetermined circumstances, according to the Pew Research Center.
In 2021, the states with the highest gun suicide rates were Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
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