Last Saturday's mass shooting in Birmingham, Ala., in which four people were killed and at least 17 were injured, was the second mass shooting in the city in two months, and follows another mass shooting outside of a Birmingham nightclub this past July.
There have been 404 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2024, after a near-record number in 2023. No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more than 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 44,341 per year, reports Vox.
An analysis of data from 2015 to 2019 shows the U.S. gun homicide rate as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021.
The political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others has long proved intractable. In 2022, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years after the Uvalde, Tex., elementary school shooting, the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
Those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The nation's expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die. Many red states have loosened their gun laws over the last few years, rather than making it harder to obtain a gun.
“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.
One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the U.S. in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic.
American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, found a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 45 percent of Americans lived in a household with guns in 2022.
There’s still a pervasive idea that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But there have been relatively few instances in which police or armed bystanders have been able to successfully stop an active attack.
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