Tag Archives: violence

Police killings in the USA

Posted on May 30, 2020 by colinmathers

The current protests in the USA made me curious to take a look at police killing rates compared to other countries. Wikipedia summarizes available statistics for most recent years, and I did some spot checks of the primary sources. The … Continue reading →

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Gun ownership and gun deaths

Posted on August 8, 2019 by colinmathers

Given recent events, I took a look at the data relating to gun deaths overall and the  extraordinarily high rates of mass shootings in the USA compared to the rest of the world. Despite President Trump blaming video games and … Continue reading →

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Major improvements in global life expectancy, Africa is starting to catch up

Posted on May 19, 2016 by colinmathers

Today we released World Health Statistics 2016, our annual publication summarizing information on the health of the world’s people . Global average life expectancy increased by 5 years between 2000 and 2015, the fastest increase since the 1960s. Those gains … Continue reading →

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Global patterns of violence against children

Posted on September 18, 2014 by colinmathers

The recently released UNICEF report on violence against children used our estimates of child homicide rates for year 2012 from the WHO Global Health Observatory. Of course, these estimates are uncertain for countries without good death registration data. We also … Continue reading →

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The decline of war as a cause of human mortality

Posted on August 17, 2014 by colinmathers

With recent events in Iraq, Syria, Gaza and parts of Africa, and shortly after the century in which millions were killed Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, Steven Pinker’s claim that the human impact of war and conflict has been diminishing may … Continue reading →

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The long-term decline of violence and global homicide rates

Posted on August 14, 2014 by colinmathers

I have just finished reading Steven Pinker’s book “ The Better Angels of our Nature: why violence has declined”. This very large book (802 pages) is an ambitious and serious attempt to show that violence in all its forms (nonfatal, … Continue reading →

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