Las Vegas shooting: Nevada's gun-death ratio is higher than the US average

Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 59 dead and more than 500 injured, the discussion surrounding gun laws in the US has reignited.

Barack Obama said that one of the greatest frustrations of his presidency was the inability to pass any "common sense gun safety laws".

Obama's presidency was marked by several mass shootings including those at Orlando, Newtown and Aurora – but these were all eclipsed by the deadliest such attack in US history on Sunday evening (1 October).

More than 20,000 innocent music fans were targeted when Stephen Paddock, armed with dozens of assault rifles and other weapons, shot at the crowd from his hotel window on the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay Hotel.

This latest attack has stunned America, but in the US state of Nevada where the shooting took place, the number of people who die from similar incidents each year are already way above the national average.

In 2013, the number of deaths from firearms per 100,000 people in Nevada was 14.16 according to the Violence Policy Center, placing the state higher than the national average of 10.64.

Nevada's figure places it as the 15th worst state for firearm death ratio.

But it is also notoriously difficult to acquire any data on gun permits and ownership, with access to the data varying from state-to-state.

In theory, Nevada issues details of the number of gun permits in the state to the public, but this often takes a long time to be revealed by authorities.

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in a 2012 study awarded every US state a grade depending on the strength of their gun laws. It gave Nevada an F.

One contested figure is how the number of guns per state correlates with the number of gun-related deaths.

The five states with the lowest rate of gun deaths per 100,000 people, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, are also the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership per household.

The number of guns also affects the deaths of police officers too.

The Firearm Prevalence and Homicides of Law Enforcement Officers in the United States revealed in 2015 that for every 10,000 law enforcement officers, low gun-states had a police death rate of 0.31, that figure was 0.91 in high-gun states.