"At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," Barack Obama said today in response to the killings in Charleston. "It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency."

[...]

On that point, he's absolutely right: when it comes to gun homicide, the U.S. stands out from the rest of the world's wealthy nations. According to homicide data collected by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and compiled by The Guardian newspaper, the U.S.'s annual gun homicide rate of 2.97 fatalities per 100,000 people is triple the rate seen in most of the world's other wealthy nations, defined in this chart as countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It excludes Latin American countries like Mexico that have traditionally had high murder rates, often due to political instability and the drug war.

The chart in the article was re-tweetted by several people.

This graph took my breath away. There are no words, no lectures, no advice. Just data. #CharlestonShooting pic.twitter.com/4w9QYXhqfB

— Dr Kirstin Ferguson (@kirstinferguson) June 20, 2015