What are the latest per capita knife homicide rates in the United States versus Canada and the UK?
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Executive summary
Available sources do not provide a single, directly comparable "per capita knife homicide rate" for the United States in the same format as for Canada, England & Wales or the UK; however, Office for National Statistics (England & Wales) reports 244 knife homicides in 2022/23 and StatCan publishes Canada’s annual counts by method through 2024 [1] [2] [3]. International compilations of “stabbing deaths per 100,000” exist (WorldPopulationReview / DataPandas) but mix definitions and years and note regional differences in weapon shares [4] [5].
1. The core measurement problem: “knife homicide rate” isn’t uniformly published
Countries and databases record homicides differently: some publish total homicides and the share committed with knives, others publish counts by weapon, and some produce per-100,000 rates for “stabbings” that combine different years and geographies. WorldPopulationReview and DataPandas present stabbing deaths per 100,000 for many countries but their methods and years vary; official national sources (ONS, Statistics Canada) provide counting tables that must be converted to per-capita rates before comparison [4] [5] [1] [3].
2. What the UK (England & Wales) reporting shows
The Office for National Statistics reports 244 knife homicides in the year ending March 2023 (and ONS appendix tables give method-of-killing breakdowns), and later ONS/Home Office releases show around 196–262 knife-enabled homicides or knife homicides depending on the reporting window cited for 2024–2025 periods [2] [1] [6] [7]. ONS also documents that knives are used in a far higher share of UK homicides (about 40–83% in specific age groups) than in many other countries [1].
3. What Canada’s official data provide—and what they don’t
Statistics Canada publishes an annual time series for “number of homicide victims, by method,” through 2024, which includes counts for stabbing and other methods; the table is the authoritative source for Canada’s knife homicide counts but does not itself report a per-100,000 stabbing rate—users must divide by population to get a per-capita rate [3]. Available sources do not mention a single published Canadian per-capita stabbing homicide rate comparable to the UK’s ONS releases [3].
4. The United States: notable absence in the supplied sources
The supplied search results do not include an official U.S. federal source (FBI, CDC or DOJ) reporting a recent national knife-specific homicide rate or count that is directly comparable to the cited UK and Canadian tables. Available sources do not mention a U.S. per-capita knife homicide rate in the provided material; therefore a valid U.S.–Canada–UK comparison cannot be computed from the current reporting without pulling U.S. data not provided here [4] [3] [1].
5. Cross-national pitfalls: weapon shares vs. homicide rates
Multiple sources stress that weapon mix differs by region: the Americas have a far larger share of firearm homicides while Europe’s homicides are more often knife-related; that means a country can have a low overall homicide rate but a high share of knife killings, or vice versa [4]. WorldPopulationReview notes knives account for roughly 40% of European homicides but under 20% in North America, underscoring that comparing knife rates without also considering total homicide and firearm prevalence is misleading [4].
6. What you can do to produce an apples-to-apples comparison
Use official national tables: ONS homicide-by-method tables for England & Wales (or Home Office for UK-wide), Statistics Canada’s 35-10-0069-01 table for Canada, and the FBI/CDC homicide-by-method series for the United States (not present in current sources). Convert counts to rates per 100,000 using mid-year population estimates for the same year and ensure the reporting windows match [1] [3] [4].
7. Trust but verify: alternative compilations exist but require caution
Aggregators (WorldPopulationReview, DataPandas, Statista) publish stabbing-per-100,000 rankings and summaries but mix years, include or exclude subnational units (e.g., England & Wales vs. UK), and sometimes rely on UNODC or national releases with differing definitions—use them for quick context but verify against the primary national tables before drawing firm conclusions [4] [5] [2].
Limitations: this analysis uses only the supplied sources and therefore cannot state a precise U.S. knife homicide per-capita rate because an authoritative U.S. figure is not present in the provided material; readers seeking exact comparative rates should pull the FBI/CDC weapon-of-homicide breakdown and 2023–2024 population estimates to calculate per-100,000 figures consistent with the ONS and StatCan tables cited here [1] [3] [4].