The United States has fewer restrictive gun laws than any other nation on the planet. I see this as a point of pride. As a nation, we don't restrict the rights of people, including the right to keep and bear arms.
But the anti-gun media sees this as a bug, not a feature.
They're not alone, of course, but they're a big part of why people see things in such a way. They want the United States to follow the lead of other countries and restrict the rights of ordinary citizens, all because of the actions of people who are breaking the existing gun control laws.
For most of us a “near miss”—whether a car wreck or a marriage breakup—calls on us to ask, “Why” and to seek answers. So, certainly the near assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump calls for similar digging into root causes we can address.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that crime is a big, national problem, and no doubt this near tragedy reinforces our worry. But what many of us may not grasp is how much more serious our crime challenge is relative to nations we assume to be our peers. In assassinations alone, we are one of just three countries sharing top place for the number of presidents killed between 1875 and 2004.
The U.S. by far leads the world in gun ownership per capita, with a rate of 121 guns per 100 people. With under 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Among our peer countries, Canada is second with 35 guns per 100 people, or roughly one-third our rate. But note this big difference: Canada suffers just over two gun-related deaths per 100,000 while our rate is 11 deaths. Closely following Canada in number of guns owned are Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. All have fewer than three gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. That’s almost a quarter of our rate.
Our country is also plagued by mass shootings—defined as the killing or injuring of four or more. By this measure, in 2023 America experienced almost two a day—totaling more than 650 such shootings.
No, that's not how it's defined. Not by the FBI, not by most other mass shooting or mass murder databases, and not by a whole lot of people who don't have an anti-gun agenda. That's only how the Gun Violence Archive opts to define them, and to pretend that's a universally accepted definition is laughable.
Anyway, moving on...
Among the young in America—those 1 to 17—more now die from firearms than by any other type of injury or illness; and this death rate doubled in just eight years, from 2013 to 2021. And Black, Latino, and Indigenous people in the U.S. are more than 10 times, more than two times, and nearly 3.5 times (respectively) to die of homicide by firearms compared with whites.
So, what are possible solutions?
We can start by seeking lessons from our peer countries.
Except that we actually can't.
No, we shouldn't, either, but we actually and literally can't follow any lessons from our "peer countries," whatever the hell that means.
The reasons are pretty straightforward.
First, there is a Second Amendment in place. Even if we suddenly decided that gun control was a good idea, it's unconstitutional, particularly to the degree that it exists in many of these other nations.
But a lot of us aren't convinced that gun control is actually the right strategy anyway.
Take non-gun homicides, for example. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how our non-gun homicide rate in the US--meaning all means of killing another person other than with a firearm--was actually higher than these "peer countries'" total homicide rates.
In other words, even if every single gun vanished today and those homicides never actually happened, we'd still have the highest homicide rate in the developed world.
And really, only a fool would believe that all of those murders committed with a gun wouldn't have happened if guns weren't a thing. While many might not have, others might have happened with other weapons, ranging from knives to poison. If someone wants another person dead, it's idiotic to think they're limiting their options to just firearms.
There is something very different about the United States compared to these so-called peer nations. We're a more violent people, even if folks are uncomfortable hearing that. We need to evaluate why that is and then address the underlying issues.
Especially considering that among the nations of the Western Hemisphere, we're not even close to the most violent or dangerous.
In fact, look at the most dangerous nations in the world. All of them have strict gun control laws. None of them are the United States.
See, what people like the author love to do is to omit most of those anti-gun nations, pretending that they matter because of some other reason, but if gun control worked as advertised, why aren't these other nations so much safer?
The short answer is that the issue isn't gun control and never has been. It's just an easy target for people in the anti-gun media to aim for without ever having to worry about being proven wrong.
