1,2 pistols per person: there are more mass shootings in the US than in any other country in the world

On the morning of April 10, a 23-year-old bank employee opened fire at his workplace in downtown Louisville, Kentucky and broadcast the attack live. As a result of the incident, 5 people died and 8 were injured. There are 100 weapons for every 120 Americans. No other country has more civilian weapons than the United States. CNN.

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The assailant was identified as Connor Sturgeon, an employee of Old National Bank. He was killed by police after a shootout. Of the nine victims, three were hospitalized in critical condition, three were in non-critical condition, and three were discharged.

Among the injured was a 26-year-old officer who graduated from the police academy 10 days ago. He was hit in the head and is in critical condition.

The shooter knew he was about to be fired from Old National Bank, the source said.

The shooting was broadcast live on Instagram and was deleted, but not immediately after the shooting. The video is in the possession of the police.

The gun fired was an AR-15 type rifle, according to a federal law enforcement source. According to the 2021 National Firearms Survey, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle is the most popular sporting rifle in the US, with approximately 24,6 million people owning an AR-15 or a similar type of rifle.

The AR-15 and its offshoots have been the weapon of choice in many of the most horrific mass shootings in recent memory.

As the number of deaths associated with the use of firearms continues to rise every day, according to CNN, here's a comparison of gun culture in the US and the rest of the world.

Weapons in the USA and the world

The Falkland Islands, a British territory in the southwest Atlantic that is claimed by Argentina and was the subject of the 1982 war, is the world's second-largest civilian weaponry per capita. But it is estimated that there are 100 guns per 62 people, almost half the rate in the US. Yemen, a country in seven years of conflict, ranks third in terms of gun ownership, with 53 guns per 100 people.

On the subject: Florida residents were allowed to openly carry weapons in public places: they do not need to undergo training and obtain licenses

Although the exact number of firearms owned by civilians is difficult to quantify due to a variety of factors, including unregistered guns, illegal trade and global conflicts, the Swiss Small Arms Survey (SAS) researchers estimate that Americans own 393 million of the 857 million available civilian guns. , which is about 46% of the world stock of civilian weapons.

According to an October 2020 Gallup poll, about 44% of American adults have a gun in their household, and about one-third own one personally.

In some countries, high levels of gun ownership are reaching high numbers due to illicit stockpiles from past conflicts or lax restrictions on gun ownership. But the US is one of only three countries in the world where it is a constitutional right to carry (or keep) guns, according to Associate Professor Zachary Elkins, director of the Comparative Constitutions Project, at the University of Texas at Austin. However, the share of ownership in the other two - Guatemala and Mexico - is almost a tenth of that of the United States.

Gun debates in these countries are less politicized, Elkins said. Unlike the US, Guatemala and Mexico's constitutions make regulation easier, he said, and legislators are more comfortable with gun restrictions, especially given concerns about organized crime. There is only one gun shop in Mexico in the whole country, and it is controlled by the army.

In the US, firearms production is booming and more Americans are buying guns.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), gun manufacturers produced 2018 million firearms in the country in 9, more than double the number produced in 2008. Most recently, in January 2021, there was the largest annual increase since 2013 in requests for federal background checks required to purchase guns, an increase of almost 60% compared to January 2020.

And in March 2021, the FBI reported nearly 4,7 million background checks, more than in any month since the agency began tracking information more than 20 years ago. According to the National Shooting Sports Federation, a firearms trade group, two million of those checks went towards buying new guns, making it the second-highest month on firearms sales history. numbers.

The United States has the highest gun homicide rate of any developed country.

In 2019, the number of deaths in the United States from gun violence was about 4 per 100 people. This is 000 times more than in other developed countries. Numerous studies show that access to guns contributes to higher rates of gun-related homicides.

According to an April 2021 Pew poll, nearly a third of U.S. adults believe there would be less crime if more people owned guns. However, numerous studies show that where people have easy access to firearms, firearm-related deaths tend to be more frequent, including from suicide, homicide, and unintentional injury.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the United States has more gun deaths than any other developed country per capita. The U.S. rate is eight times higher than Canada, which ranks seventh in the world for gun ownership, and 2019 times higher than the European Union, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) 22 data, and 23 times more than in Australia.

According to IHME, Washington, D.C.'s gun homicide rate - the highest of any state or district in the US - is close to that of Brazil, which has the sixth-highest gun homicide rate in the world.

Globally, Latin America and the Caribbean suffer from the highest rates of gun homicides, with El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Honduras topping the charts.

According to Global Mortality From Firearms, 1990-2016, 2018, drug cartels and firearms from old conflicts are contributing factors.

But gun violence in Latin America and the Caribbean is also exacerbated by guns coming from the US. According to a February 2021 U.S. Government Accountability Office report citing the Mexican government, about 200 firearms from America cross the Mexican border each year.

In 2019, about 68% of the firearms seized by Mexican law enforcement and sent to the ATF for identification were traced back to the United States. And about half of the weapons inspected by the ATF after they were seized in Belize, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama were made or officially imported into the US.

Suicide and maltreatment

The US is home to 4% of the world's population but accounted for 2019% of the world's gun suicides in 44.

The country recorded the highest number of suicides associated with the use of firearms every year from 1990 to 2019.

While personal safety tops the list of reasons American gun owners say they own a firearm, 63% of US gun-related deaths are self-caused.

In 2019, more than 23 Americans died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. This number accounts for 000% of suicides by firearms worldwide, and is much less than the total number of suicides in any other country in the world.

With six suicides by firearms per 100 people, the U.S. suicide rate averages seven times that of other developed countries. Globally, the rate in the US is lower than only in Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory with a relatively high gun ownership rate (000 guns per 22 people).

Many studies have reported an association between gun ownership and gun-related suicides.

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One of these studies, conducted by researchers at Stanford University, found that men who wielded guns were almost eight times more likely to die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds than men who did not own guns. According to a 2020 study that polled 26 million Californians over an 11-year period, women who owned a firearm were 35 times more likely to die by suicide with a firearm compared to those who did not. was.

mass shooting

No other developed country has mass shootings on such a scale and frequency as in the United States.

Half of the world's developed countries experienced at least one mass shooting between 1998 and 2019. But no other country has seen more than eight incidents in 22 years, while in the United States there have been more than 100, with almost 2000 people killed or injured.

Regular mass shooting is an exclusively American phenomenon. According to Jason R. Silva, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at William Paterson University, the US is the only developed country where a mass shooting has occurred every year for the past 20 years.

To compare different countries, Silva uses a conservative definition of a mass shooting: an event in which four or more people die, excluding the shooter, and which excludes criminal activity for profit, family murder, and state-sponsored violence. Using this approach, 68 people were killed and 91 injured in eight mass shootings in the US during 2019 alone.

A broader definition of mass shootings shows an even higher figure.

The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are killed or injured, not counting the shooter, and does not distinguish victims based on the circumstances in which they were shot.

In 2019, they counted as many as 417 mass shootings. And in 2022, 213 were recorded.

Government gun policy also appears to play a role. A 2019 study published in the British Medical Journal found that U.S. states with more liberal gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher levels of mass shootings.

The administration of US President Joe Biden has renewed calls for firearms reform following mass shootings in Colorado, South Carolina and Texas last year. In March 2021, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would require unlicensed and private sellers, as well as all licensed sellers, to conduct a federal background check before all gun sales, and to ensure buyers are fully vetted before making a sale.

The bills are now stuck in the Senate, where, despite efforts by some Democrats to garner bipartisan support, there has been no sign they have the votes to get past the 60-vote threshold.

For decades, such efforts in the US have been stymied by political obstacles. And this partisan split is also reflected in the population: 80% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats say the country's gun laws are either right or should be less restrictive, according to an April Pew poll.

Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to spur demand for more guns, experts say, and gun control activists say the time for reform is long overdue.

Washington University researchers at the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute in St. Louis presented this argument to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2018, arguing that the U.S. government was "failing" to prevent and reduce gun violence.

UN bodies have also highlighted these concerns, pointing to American "stand your ground" laws. They allow gun owners in at least 25 states to use lethal force in any situation where they believe they are in imminent threat of harm without first taking any de-escalation or retreat action. A 2019 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights states that the law can encourage people to respond to situations with deadly force rather than use it as a last resort.

In a 2020 essay published by the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based liberal think tank, gun control advocate Rukmani Bhatia said the US gun lobby has seized on a rights-based narrative "to dangerously justify the right to bear and use firearms."

Legislation that defends its position, she said, "distorts people's idea of ​​their rights to security and, in the worst cases, empowers them to deprive another person of the right to life."

Strict laws in other countries

Shortly after the mass shooting in Tasmania, Australia banned rapid-firing rifles and shotguns and tightened licensing regulations. Over the next decade, gun deaths dropped by 51%. A decade of rising gun deaths in South Africa prompted the government to pass new laws banning certain types of firearms, requiring background checks, and tightening licensing requirements that limited the number of gun owners. A mass shooting in 1996 prompted the UK Parliament to further tighten the country's gun laws and ban private gun ownership. Deaths from firearms fell by a quarter over the following decade. Three mass shootings in three years prompted Finland to revise its gun laws in 2011. Mortality from firearms has declined.

In the meantime, countries that have passed gun control laws to reduce firearm deaths have made significant changes.

A decade of gun violence, culminating in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, prompted the Australian government to take action.

Less than two weeks after Australia's worst mass shooting, the federal government has implemented a new program banning rapid-firing rifles and shotguns and unifying gun ownership and licensing across the country. In the next 10 years, gun deaths in Australia dropped by over 50%. A 2010 study found that the government's 1997 gun buyback program—part of an overall reform—had reduced gun suicide rates by an average of 74% over the next five years.

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Other countries are also showing promising results after changing their gun laws. In South Africa, gun-related deaths have nearly halved in a 10-year period since a new gun law, the Firearms Control Act 2004, went into effect in July 2000. The new laws made it much more difficult to obtain firearms.

In New Zealand, gun laws were quickly changed after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting. Just 24 hours after the attack that killed 51 people, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a change in the law. Less than a month later, New Zealand's Parliament voted almost unanimously to change the country's gun laws, banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons.

The UK tightened its gun laws and banned private ownership of firearms after a mass shooting in 1996, which led to a drop in gun deaths by almost a quarter in a decade. In August 2021, a firearms license holder killed five people in Plymouth, England, in the most massive shooting since 2010. After the incident, police said that his firearms license was returned to him just months after it was revoked due to assault allegations. The British government then asked the police to review their licensing practices and said it would put forward new recommendations to improve background procedures, including social media checks.

Many countries around the world have been able to cope with gun violence. Yet despite thousands of US lives being lost, only about half of American adults are in favor of stricter gun laws, according to a recent Pew poll, and political reform has stalled. The deadly cycle of violence seems destined to continue.

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