Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 42 percent of American households overall owned guns in 2021. They’re called “ super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents in Iceland, it’s 31.7.Īmerican guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic. One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, and there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws. The US has a lot of guns, and more guns mean more gun deaths But the recent shootings underscore why narrow reform won’t stop mass shootings - and just how embedded gun violence is in the US. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years. “America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm. But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists those problems aren’t unique. Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 shootings in which at least four people are killed. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. These shootings come in the wake of numerous others last year including at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado on a school bus allegedly targeting members of the University of Virginia football team at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. It follows mass shootings at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama a bank in Louisville, Kentucky at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee at Michigan State University at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, California and at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California. The incident in Cleveland is America’s 174th mass shooting - an incident during which four or more people are shot, as defined by the Gun Violence Archive - since the beginning of 2023. Five people were shot and killed Friday night, including an 8-year-old, in a mass shooting that occurred at a Cleveland, Texas home after neighbors asked the shooter to stop firing his assault rifle in his front yard because their baby was trying to sleep.
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