Small Arms Proliferation
The widespread availability and illicit proliferation of small arms and light weapons fuels homicide, armed conflict, insecurity, displacement, and barriers to development worldwide. The cited evidence reports 260,000 small-arms deaths in 2021, representing 45% of violent deaths that year.
Severity score
70.4
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Steady
What this is
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
85Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
78People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
72Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
25Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
72Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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