This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) attention to firearm violence between 2000 and 2025, arguing that despite the scale and severity of gun-related harm, firearm violence has been progressively sidelined within global health governance. Drawing on a review of World Health Assembly resolutions, WHO policy documents, and expert interviews, the report shows that firearms are largely absent from WHO violence-prevention frameworks, even in areas where they are a leading cause of death and injury, including femicide, violence against children, youth homicide, and suicide.
The report situates firearm violence as a major public health crisis with profound physical, mental, social, and economic consequences. Guns disproportionately affect children, women, young men, and marginalized communities, particularly in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa. Firearm injuries place significant and preventable strain on health systems, contribute to long-term disability and psychological trauma, drive displacement and poverty, and are strongly associated with suicide and intimate partner homicide. The report further frames gun violence as a commercial determinant of health, highlighting the role of the firearm and ammunition industries in shaping permissive regulatory environments and resisting public health interventions.
Despite clear precedents—most notably the WHO’s leadership on tobacco control—the report finds that political pressure from certain Member States and industry actors has constrained WHO action. It concludes with a call for renewed WHO leadership, outlining concrete recommendations to strengthen research, data collection, trauma care, regulation, and advocacy, and to integrate firearm violence into existing global health strategies as a priority public health issue.
