Do more Europeans die of summer heat than Americans die of guns?
Story 239: Heads up - humble pie is on the menu today
The UK’s hottest day of the year so far, 38.1ºC at Kew on Thursday 13 August. This is the UK’s fifth heatwave of the year. Summer 2026 is on track to be the hottest on record for the UK.
We know that heat is more than uncomfortable for some. Looking to 2050, it is both heat and water are climate threats, especially for Barnes SW13, an aging riverside urban village.
Do you know how much of a threat? How many people have died this year because of the heatwave?
The number is rarely reported. Do you know?*
Meanwhile, another story is brewing. Its exact location is not clear but we know its rough outline.
A young man, it is almost always a young man, takes a weapon to school or college, shoots his fellow students or staff. Sometimes he then turns on himself.
In 2025 there were more than five hundred incidents where four or more people were shot, whether killed or wounded.
Every time it hurts. Maybe it is hearing a younger American family member talk about her school drills for such an attack at infant school. Maybe it is the still-shocking prevalence of guns.
Then I saw this chart.
Really?
More Europeans die of summer heat than Americans die of guns?
Welcome to Barnes2050, a place-based futures project asking: how do we make sure Barnes - the place and its people - is thriving and climate-ready by 2050?
Hannah Ritchie, a scientist and researcher at the University of Oxford, spent some time challenging the comparison. She made some useful adjustments to the formula and the numbers, including:
using comparable estimates of excess heat death on both sides
using a broader definition of Europe to include 26 EU countries (excluding Malta), plus the UK, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Norway, and Serbia
breaking down US gun deaths by homicide, suicide, and other causes such as unintentional injury and deaths by law enforcement
and, critically, show the data as rates per 100,000 people in the total population
Here’s the result:
Notes & thoughts
A change but still.
Those numbers are much closer than expected. Or is comfortable.
As Hannah Ritchie says, the framing is ‘silly’. These are not substitutes. Europe is doing a bad job of protecting itself from life-threatening heat. Americans have an unusually high rate of gun deaths.
What does connect them is our emotional response.
Or lack of it.
American gun massacre: Brit shakes head, asks why do you accept this, why not ban guns?
Brits die in heat: silence
Power of status quo
Brits should remain saddened and confused by the American acceptance of these deaths. We must never lose that empathy.
Then we should look to ourselves. Why do we accept these deaths?
That means challenging the status quo. As Ritchie points out, the comparison shows how easily people grow accustomed to what surrounds them: ‘Both places take the status quo as a given: a high-mortality situation in one domain that they’d never accept in another.’
We stop seeing the thing we are experiencing.
That matters as we look towards 2050. A climate-ready Barnes will not emerge simply because we understand that hotter summers are coming. It requires us to notice when the extraordinary is becoming ordinary, in this case refusing to accept avoidable deaths as the inevitable price of warmer weather.
However we achieve it, we need to learn that habit. It is going to be key to charting a path to 2050 that allows Barnes to thrive and be climate-ready.
*Nearly 2,900 deaths have already been associated with extreme heat in the UK this year. That is before the effects of the latest heatwaves are fully counted. The definitive UKHSA Heat mortality monitoring report, England: 2026 isn’t scheduled for publication until 1 April 2027.
You can read more on the effects of heat on Barnes, now and in future, here.