Which country had the lowest gun homicide rate per 100,000 population in 2025?

1. Why the question looks simple but isn’t: data, definitions and omission

The seemingly straightforward query — which country had the lowest firearm homicide rate per 100,000 in 2025 — runs headlong into standard problems in comparative violence statistics: different data curators, varying inclusion rules (criminal versus justifiable homicide, whether accidental firearm deaths are counted), and the outsized influence of tiny populations on per‑100k figures, all of which the World Population Review cautions can distort apparent rankings and year‑to‑year swings for small countries ^[2]. The authoritative global dataset often used for year‑to‑year comparisons is compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and republished and visualized by Our World in Data, but the snippeted material supplied references the dataset without delivering a country-by-country 2025 rank list in the provided excerpts, so the precise lowest‑rate country for 2025 cannot be extracted from these sources as given ^[1].

2. What the major datasets and reporting actually say (and what they don’t)

Our World in Data points to the UNODC as the underlying source for firearm-homicide rates and offers a grapher of “homicide rate from firearms” per 100,000; the metadata emphasizes UN processing and cross‑national harmonization but the snippet does not include the final ranked values needed to answer “which country was lowest in 2025” ^[1]. Wikipedia’s “List of countries by firearm-related homicide rates” is explicitly a country-by-country compilation but the provided snippet only describes the list and its methodological caveats — it does not quote a 2025 minimum in the excerpts supplied here ^[3]. World Population Review and its country pages likewise publish gun‑death and murder‑rate lists and stress per‑100k calculations and age standardization, but the supplied snippets again explain methodology and offer examples (e.g., Japan as a low‑murder country) without producing a clear, single-country 2025 minimum in the provided text ^{[6] [5]}.

3. Plausible low-rate candidates cited in the reporting

The reporting points toward two complementary observations: first, among higher-income countries certain European states and wealthy, regulated societies report very low firearm-homicide rates — Japan is repeatedly noted as an example of low overall murder rates tied to strict gun regulation ^[5]. Second, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation situates U.S. internal variation (New Hampshire at 1.1 per 100,000) to highlight how even the U.S. subnational low is multiple times higher than the European low observed in Cyprus (0.36 per 100,000), implying that some European countries register firearm homicide rates substantially below 1 per 100,000 ^[4]. Those citations point to the type of nations that tend to occupy the bottom of global lists, but neither source provides a direct, sourced statement that one particular country held the absolute lowest firearm‑homicide rate in 2025 among all UN member states ^{[5] [4]}.

4. Why an authoritative answer requires the underlying table or raw dataset

To produce a definitive answer — the single country with the minimum firearm-homicide rate in 2025 — requires access to the full UNODC/Our World in Data table or the World Population Review/Wikipedia ranked list for 2025; without the explicit 2025 row data in the supplied excerpts, naming a single nation would exceed what the provided reporting supports. The available sources explain methodology, flag likely low-rate jurisdictions, and illustrate how per‑100k metrics can mislead when populations are small, but they stop short of the exact 2025 country‑by‑country minimum needed to answer the question conclusively ^{[1] [2] [3]}.