A man in the US state of Washington has shot himself dead while attempting to take a selfie with his gun in hand.

The 43-year-old, whose name was not released, was taking selfies with his partner at their Skagit County home when he pulled the trigger, thinking the gun was unloaded, and shot himself in the face.

According to Skagit County Sheriff's Office Chief of Patrol Chad Clark, the man’s partner reported the incident and said that the man had loaded and unloaded the gun multiple times that day.

After the last time, however, a bullet apparently was left in the gun, Clark said. The death is therefore being investigated as accidental, he noted.

Such stories are not unprecedented in the US, as a 19-year-old man from Houston killed himself last year while taking photographs of himself and posting them on Instagram, a social networking platform.

He too thought the gun was empty when he aimed it at his head for a photo.

According to a new study published in The American Journal of Medicine, Americans are ten times more likely to be shot dead by firearms than people in 22 other high-income countries.

The survey also found that the proportion of suicides involving guns was eight times higher.

This is while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that a more than 1.5 million domestic gun deaths have been registered in the US between 1968 and 2014.

CDC also reports that firearms kill more than 33,000 people in the US every year, a number that includes accidental discharge, murder and suicides.

Today, it is estimated that there are between 270 million and 300 million guns in the US, about one per person, according to the New York Daily News.