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10 Big Questions in the U.S. Gun Control Debate

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In May 2021, a disgruntled employee at a public transit rail yard in San Jose, California, opened fire on co-workers, firing 39 rounds that killed eight of them and wounding a ninth who later died, before taking his own life in front of law enforcement officers who had rushed to the scene. The mass killer had three 9-millimeter semi-automatic handguns with him and 11 ammunition magazines on his belt. Later, authorities found 12 more firearms and 25,000 rounds of ammunition at the suspect's home [sources: Fernando, Hays and Hauck ; Hanna and Vera ].

The horrific slaughter was yet another shock to a nation that in recent decades has been traumatized again and again by mass shootings, from the killing of 20 elementary school students and six adults by a 20-year-old gunman in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, to the massacre of 58 spectators at a country music concert in Las Vegas by a 64-year-old sniper who rained fire down on them from the 32nd floor of a resort hotel [sources: Candiotti and Aarthun ; Hutchinson, et al .].

From 1999 to 2021, more than 2,000 people were killed in mass shootings, according to an analysis by Reuters [source: Canipe and Hartman ]. But mass shootings are just part of the larger pattern of firearm violence. In 2020, despite the pandemic, nearly 20,000 people were killed in homicides and 24,000 died in suicides involving guns [source: Thebault and Rindler ].That unceasing carnage has led many Americans to call for stricter gun laws.

"We need to treat gun violence as a public health issue, " Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in a 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, explained in a 2021 interview [source: Allen ].

But gun rights advocates say such laws would violate Americans' constitutional right to bear arms. They also argue that citizens need weaponry to defend against criminals. "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun, " National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said in 2012 [source: CBS DC ].

Others even say that gun rights are essential to stave off the possibility of government tyranny.

"The Second Amendment is about maintaining, within the citizenry, the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary, " Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told an audience a political rally in May 2021 [source: Chamberlain ].

So which side is right? That's for you to decide. But to help you make an informed decision, here are answers to 10 big questions in the U.S. gun control debate.

• How Many Guns Are in the U.S.?
• What Does the Second Amendment Say?
• Is the U.S. Gun Homicide Rate Really That High?
• Are There Countries With as Many Guns as the U.S. but With Less Crime?
• Could Technological Advances Make Gun Control Impossible?
• How Often Do Gun Owners Actually Prevent Crimes?
• How Often Are People Killed by Their Own Guns?
• Did the Federal Ban on Assault Weapons Affect Crime?
• Do States With Strict Gun Control Laws Have Less Gun Violence?
• Has American Public Opinion Shifted on Gun Control?

10: How Many Guns Are in the U.S.?

The U.S. has a lot of guns — so many, in fact, that there's more than one firearm for every person who lives in the country. According to the Geneva, Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, in 2017 there were an estimated 393 million guns in the U.S., including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns [source: Karp ]. This already huge privately held arsenal is growing at a very fast rate. In 2020 alone, Americans purchased nearly 40 million firearms, according to FBI data [source: McIntyre ].

That may lead you to the mistaken impression that everyone is packing heat. In truth, however, the majority of Americans still are unarmed. A 2020 Gallup Poll found that only 32 percent of Americans personally owned a gun, though 44 percent lived in households in which someone possessed a firearm. Firearm owners were most likely to be male, white, Republicans or politically conservative, live in the South and have a household income of over $100,000. In contrast, only 19 percent of women owned guns, and low percentages of nonwhite Americans, political moderates and liberals, people in the Eastern U.S. and those earning less than $40,000 owned firearms [source: Saad ].

But gun purchases — and gun manufacturing — are both at all-time highs. So, if more guns are being sold, more people must be owning guns, right? Wrong. It appears most of the new gun purchases are by existing gun owners. In fact, a relatively small number of heavily armed people own most of the country's guns. A groundbreaking study published in 2017 by the Russell Sage Foundation found that half of America's gun stock (at the time, approximately 130 million guns) was owned by approximately 14 percent of gun owners [source: Azrael, et al .].

9: What Does the Second Amendment Say?

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states the following: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." But what that means is the subject of intense debate. Pro-gun partisans argue that the Constitution's framers guaranteed peoples' right to possess and carry just about any sort of firearm. Gun control advocates say it was intended to allow states to maintain the equivalent of today's National Guard units [source: Krouse ].

But as Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes once noted, "The Constitution is what the judges say it is" [source: Columbia University ]. And so far, probably to both sides' frustration, the courts have never fully defined the Second Amendment and its implications. Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings that mostly have upheld the government's authority to impose restrictions upon weapons.

For example, in the 1937 case U.S. v. Miller , a court upheld a federal statute requiring licensing of sawed-off shotguns, saying that some types of weaponry weren't needed by a militia and thus weren't constitutionally protected. (Gun rights advocates replied that this type of weapon had been used by militia before.) More recently, in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller , the court found that citizens did have a right to possess handguns at home for self-defense. But the justices said the government still could impose other limits — such as banning criminals and those with mental illness from owning guns, regulating gun sales and barring guns from schools and other places [source: Krouse ].

8: Is the U.S. Gun Homicide Rate Really That High?

In 2019, guns were used in 13,927 homicides in the U.S. — in nearly 74 percent of murders that year [source: FBI ]. Whether that rate seems high to you depends upon your perspective. According to a global database maintained by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the U.S. ranks 32nd in deaths from gun violence worldwide, with 3.96 killings per 100,000 people [source: Aizenman ].

But many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean had vastly higher rates. El Salvador's gun homicide rate was 36.78 per 100,000 — more than nine times the U.S. rate. Venezuela (33.27), Guatemala (29.06), Colombia (26.36), Brazil (21.93), Bahamas (21.52) and Mexico (16.41) all had proportionately much bigger problems. The Philippines (8.05) and South Africa (5.28) also outdid the U.S., according to the same report.

But those places tend to be developing countries where law and order is weak, or places with political unrest. Compared to other industrialized democracies, the U.S. gun homicide rate is through the roof. The U.K., for example, had just 0.04 gun killings per 100,000 in 2019, and Japan and South Korea had only 0.02. Canada had 0.47. In other words, the U.S. death rate from gun violence was eight times as high as that of Canada and 100 times that of the U.K. [source: Aizenman ].

So here's another question: Would the homicide rate in the U.S. be lower if there were fewer guns available? A comparison with England and Wales suggests that it might be. Those parts of the U.K. actually have higher rates of some violent crimes than the U.S. The English-Welsh assault rate was 925.4 per 100,000 population in 2018, compared to just 246.84 in the U.S., and the robbery rate of 131.227 per 100,000 in 2017 was 33 percent higher than the U.S. rate. But the U.S. has a lot more killing — its homicide rate in 2017 was more than quadruple the English-Welsh homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 [source: UNODC ]. As the American Psychological Association concluded in a 2013 report on gun violence, "The use of a gun greatly increases the odds that violence will lead to a fatality."

7: Are There Countries With as Many Guns as the U.S. but With Less Crime?

No, because there isn't another country in the world with as many guns as the U.S. The U.S. comprises 4 percent of the world's population, but owns about 40 percent of the world's civilian firearms. The rate of about 121 guns per 100 people is tops in the world, followed by the politically unstable Yemen, at 53 guns per 100 people [source: Small Arms Survey ].

So, let's reframe the question. Are there countries with relatively high gun-ownership rates — and low crime rates? Yes: Finland, which has 32 guns per 100 people, and Canada, which has 34.7 guns per 100 people. (Finland ranks fourth in the world for the rate of private gun ownership.) Finland had just 9 gun homicides in 2016, a rate of 0.20 per 100,000 people. Canada, with 223 gun killings in 2016, had a slightly higher rate of 0.62 per 100,000 [source: Gunpolicy.org ].

But both those countries have stricter gun control laws than the U.S. In Finland, a nation where most use guns for hunting rather than protection, citizens must obtain gun licenses, which must be renewed every five years. They also must state the reason they wish to have a gun — and self-defense is not a valid reason [source: Finnish Police ].

Police deny or revoke permission if an applicant is convicted of a crime — or shows any sort of behavior that authorities think might indicate that he or she wouldn't be safe owning a gun. Large-capacity magazines aren't permitted, and weapons must be stored in locked cabinets and unloaded if taken outside the home [source: Ministry of the Interior ].

But even so, Finland suffered mass shootings at schools in 2007 and 2008, in which gunmen killed 18 people. Since then, Finland has tightened up its gun laws, although it experienced two other mass shootings in 2009 and 2016. Still, Finland's totality of roughly 26 deaths between 2000 and 2019 is a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands of deaths in the U.S. from mass shootings [source: Australian Associated Press ].

6: Could Technological Advances Make Gun Control Impossible?

In recent years, the development of 3D-printing , in which a printer can be used to build a solid object, has the potential to greatly complicate attempts to regulate firearms. The earliest 3D-printed guns were crude single-shot devices. But as Slate writer Ari Schneider reported in 2021 , the technology has come a long way in a short time, and it's now possible to print semi-automatic rifles and pistols that don't have serial numbers or registrations, bypassing background checks. Recently, for example, plans were released for a "100 percent homemade" semi-automatic rifle that is durable enough to shoot thousands of 9 mm rounds. Most of the rifle can be 3D-printed, while the rest can be fabricated from parts available in hardware stores.

3D-printed firearms not only would be easy to make at home, and easy to hide from authorities, but potentially could be far cheaper than weapons manufactured in arms factories and sold by dealers. In just a short time, plans for the 3D-printed rifle were viewed more than 44,000 times on the original website to which the files were uploaded, according to Schneider's article .

Currently, making your own 3D gun is legal under Federal law, which permits the unlicensed manufacturing of firearms, as long as at least some of the parts are metal, according to a February 2021 article in The Trace , an online publication that focuses on gun issues. A few states have moved to clamp down on them, including New Jersey, which requires anyone who wants to use a 3D printer to make a gun to obtain a federal gun-manufacturing license. New Mexico and Virginia are considering similar restrictions.

Law enforcement officials worry about the possibility of violent extremists using 3D printers to fabricate weapons without metal components, which would enable them to be smuggled inside places where guns are prohibited, such as government buildings and airports. So far, though, even plastic guns still would need to use bullets fashioned from metal, which could be spotted [source: Barton and Brownlee ]. Additionally, Design News reported in 2019 on development of a new scanning device with the potential to spot concealed weapons regardless of their composition.

5: How Often Do Gun Owners Actually Prevent Crimes?

People opposed to gun control often have argued that they need firepower to protect themselves against criminals. Take this example from January 2013 when a Georgia woman shot a crowbar-wielding intruder who broke into her home and confronted her and her two young children [source: CBS News ]. A number of armed American citizens have also used their firearms to stop or limit mass killings, including Stephen Willeford, the armed citizen who intervened to confront and pursue a gunman who attacked First Baptist Church of Sutherland Spring, Texas in 2017 [source: CNN ].

Gun control opponents say that a vast number of crimes are prevented by armed citizens, who either shoot an assailant — an event that happened 326 times in 2010, according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal state-by-state analysis of crime statistics — or more often, chase the would-be criminal away by brandishing a weapon [source: Palazzolo and Barry ].

There is some social science to back up that thesis. Perhaps the most often-cited evidence is a 1995 study by Northwestern University School of Law researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Based upon a random telephone survey of 5,000 Americans, they concluded that there were between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year. This works out to about 1 percent use of a gun for defensive purposes [source: Kleck and Gertz ].

But critics questioned whether Kleck's and Gertz's findings were reliable. Harvard public health researcher David Hemenway published a paper refuting this and pointing out that "since only 42 percent of U.S. households own firearms and victims in two-thirds of the occupied households were asleep, the 2.5 million figure requires us to believe burglary victims use their guns in self-defense more than 100 percent of the time" [source: Hemenway ]. Another mid-1990s study, based upon a Justice Department survey of nearly 60,000 households, came up with a much smaller estimate of about 21,500 defensive gun uses annually [source: Committee on Law and Justice ].

Even if the low-end estimates are closer to the truth, this still could mean that tens of thousands of crimes are prevented by gun owners annually. But a 2009 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study found that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those who were unarmed.

4: How Often Are People Killed by Their Own Guns?

This is the point that gun control proponents often cite to counter arguments that guns deter crime . People who have guns in their households, they argue, actually may be at greater risk of being hurt or killed by a bullet — possibly one fired by an angry spouse or by a child playing with a gun that's been left out and loaded.

Again, there's some social science to support this. A 2003 study published in the journal Injury Prevention found that people in families where someone purchased a gun actually faced an elevated risk of homicide, suicide and accidental death [source: Grassel et al ]. Another study published in 2011 in the American Journal of Public Health found that 43 percent — neatly half — of all homes with guns and kids also had one unlocked firearm.

One big risk is that having a gun within easy reach can escalate an argument or fight into a homicide. A 1992 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that victims whose family members used a gun in an assault were 12 times more likely to die than when attackers used other weapons such as knives, or their bare hands [source: Saltzman et al ].

However, an article that appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy pointed out that most of the "acquaintance homicides" involved, for instance, drug dealers shooting at each other. "Approximately 90 percent of adult murderers have adult records, with an average adult criminal career ... of six or more years, including four major adult felony arrests," said the authors [source: Kates and Mauser ].

Most Americans who die from gun violence in their own homes actually inflict it upon themselves: More than 47,000 people commit suicide every year in the United States and in 2019, more than half used a firearm [source: ASFP].

3: Did the Federal Ban on Assault Weapons Affect Crime?

In 1994, Congress passed a 10-year ban on the manufacture and sale of new assault weapons, which the law defined as semi-automatic rifles and handguns with certain military-style features — such as folding rifle stocks and threaded barrels for attaching silencers — that didn't have any value to hunters or self-defense. The law also banned magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds but exempted weapons manufactured before 1994. The law was allowed to expire in 2004, and how effective it was at preventing crime remains a subject of intense controversy, in part because there wasn't a systematic effort to gather data about its impacts.

A 2004 study by University of Pennsylvania researchers for the Department of Justice found that from 1995 to 2003, gun crimes involving assault weapons that were banned by the law declined in six U.S. cities by between 17 percent and 72 percent. But some of that progress was negated, the researchers found, because even though criminals couldn't buy new assault weapons, they still could easily outfit non-banned weapons with old large-capacity magazines from before the ban, which were plentiful and easily obtained [source: Koper ].

Additionally, manufacturers were able to get around the ban by redesigning weapons and making a few changes to remove the military-style features. The Colt AR-15 that the shooter used to kill moviegoers in the Aurora cinema would have been outlawed under the 1994 ban. Yet he could have used a very similar Colt Match Target rifle that would not have fallen under the ban [source: Plumer ].

After winning election in 2020 on a platform that included gun control, President Joe Biden has pushed Congress to revive the assault weapons ban, and to make high-capacity magazines illegal as well [source: White House ].

2: Do States With Strict Gun Control Laws Have Less Gun Violence?

Critics of gun control often point to places such as the District of Columbia, which has a high rate of gun crimes despite strict gun control laws . But gun control advocates say that states' efforts at gun control are undermined, to a degree, by lax laws in neighboring states. Everytown For Gun Safety , an organization lobbying for stricter gun legislation, points out that nearly 30 percent of guns recovered from crime scenes were first sold in a different state. And a 2009 study by Johns Hopkins University researchers found that cities in states with little regulation of gun dealers had guns passing into criminals' hands at two to four times the rate of cities in states with strict laws [source: ScienceDaily ].

Social scientist Richard Florida, who has analyzed crime and demographic data, has found a strong correlation between lower firearm deaths and tighter gun restrictions, such as bans on assault weapons and requirements for trigger locks and safe storage of guns. He says that gun violence is less likely to occur in states that have gun control laws. Interestingly, he found no correlation between states' unemployment rates or drug use and gun violence, but he did find that states with high poverty, low numbers of college grads and high numbers of working-class jobs also had more gun violence [source: Florida ].

1: Has American Public Opinion Shifted on Gun Control?

In the early 1990s, Gallup polling showed that 78 percent of Americans favored tighter gun control laws . But that support declined dramatically over the next two decades, and by the mid-to-late 2000s, support dipped to just 44 percent, with nearly as many Americans (43 percent) saying that laws already were strict enough. But in the wake of the Newtown massacre, a December 2012 Gallup poll found a sharp rebound in support, with 58 percent favoring tougher gun statutes, compared to just 34 percent who said they wanted laws to remain the same [source: Saad ]. Since then, support for gun control has fluctuated, often rising in the wake of shootings. Gallup's most recent poll on this issue in November 2020 found that 57 percent of Americans supported stricter gun control [source: Brenan ].

Other recent polls on gun control vary. A Pew Research Center poll released in April 2021 found a narrower majority — 53 percent — supported stricter laws, while a March 2021 Morning Consult-Politico tracking poll found that 64 percent of American voters generally supported more gun control, versus 28 percent who said they were opposed. [sources: Bowden , Pew Research Center ].

But when polls drill down further, they often find that specific gun control measures have even broader support. In the Morning Consult-Politico poll, for example, 83 percent of voters who supported background checks on all weapons purchases and statutes preventing people identified as mentally unstable from owning guns at all. And 76 percent supported banning anyone on a federal watchlist — such as "do not fly" lists — from owning guns, while 73 percent wanted a three-day federal waiting period before a gun could be taken home from a store. Seventy percent backed creation of a national database on gun sales [source: Bowden ].

Similarly, in the Pew poll, Americans strongly backed restrictions on the type of weaponry Americans should be able to buy. Sixty-four percent favored banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, and 63 percent favored banning assault weapons such as the military-style rifles that often have been used in mass killings [source: Pew Research Center ].

But Gallup data contains another important but often overlooked point. Though the number of Americans who want stricter gun control has gone up and down (and now up again), the overwhelming majority of Americans over the past 20 years have supported laws that restrict firearms. In a Gallup Poll from October 2017, only 4 percent of those polled said they oppose background checks for all gun purchases [source: Brenan ].

However, that same 2017 poll found that a 71 percent were opposed to a ban on handguns for anyone but police or other authorized personnel. Pollsters speculate this could reflect Americans' wish to keep the right of self-defense in the wake of high-profile gun violence.

Gun Control Debate FAQs

How many guns are there in the u.s., what does the u.s. constitution say about gun control, did the federal ban on assault weapons affect crime, what's a semi-automatic gun, is it illegal to not lock up your guns, lots more information.

Author's Note: 10 Big Questions in the U.S. Gun Control Debate

I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the movie "The Deer Hunter" was set, and where a lot of my neighbors were avid hunters. So the idea of law-abiding people owning guns was never something I questioned. But except for my toy pistols, we didn't have any guns in our home, because my father, who wasn't a hunter, didn't want them around. He'd been a combat medic in the U.S. Army during World War II, and he had a huge, scary scar on his left bicep where a German machine gun bullet hit him on a battlefield in 1945. He'd had to bind up his own arm in a battlefield tourniquet, which enabled him to escape having it amputated. I still have a vivid picture in my mind of what a bullet can do to a person's body. I think that's given me a real-world perspective on the gun issue that a lot of debaters, who tend to get caught up in legal and constitutional abstractions, often seem to lack.

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• Florida, Richard. "Gun Violence in U.S. Cities Compared to the Deadliest Nations in the World." Theatlanticcities.com. Jan. 22, 2013. (Jan. 27 2013) http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/
• Fox, Kara. "How U.S. gun culture compares with the world in five charts." Feb. 15, 2018. (Feb. 15, 2018) https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html
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• GunPolicy.org. "Switzerland -- Gun Facts, Figures and the Law." Gunpolicy.org. Undated. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/switzerland
• Hanna, Jason and Vera, Amir. " Here's what we know about the San Jose rail yard shooting." CNN. May 28, 2021. (May 29, 2021) https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/us/san-jose-shooting-what-we-know/index.html
• Hemenway, David. "The Myth of Millions of Annual Self-Defense Gun Uses." Chance. 1997. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/surveys.course/Hemenway1997.pdf
• Hemenway, David. "Risks and Benefits of a Gun in the Home." American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. 2011. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/753058_4
• Hepburn, L. et al. "The US gun stock: results from the 2004 national firearms survey." Injury Prevention. 2007. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/13/1/15.full
• Hutchinson, Bill, etal. "The anatomy of the Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadliest in modern US history." ABC News. Dec. 23, 2018. (May 29, 2021) https://abcnews.go.com/US/anatomy-las-vegas-mass-shooting-deadliest-modern-us/story?id=59797324
• Hoyert, Donna L. and Xu, Jiaquan. "Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2011." Cdc.gov. Oct. 10, 2012. (Jan. 25, 2013) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
• Johnson, Brian R. "Crucial Elements of Police Firearms Training." Looseleaf Law Publications. 2008. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://books.google.com/books?id=mwvu-am3wbcC&pg=PA63&dq=semiautomatic+weapon&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eLsFUfmmC6-C0QHwkoDoDQ&ved=0CGUQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=semiautomatic%20weapon&f=false
• Keng Kuek Ser, Kuang. "Map: Here are countries with the world's highest murder rates." PRI.com. June 27, 2016 (Feb. 15, 2018) https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-27/map-here-are-countries-worlds-highest-murder-rates
• Kinard, Jeff and Tucker, Spencer C. "Pistols: An Illustrated History of Their Impact." ABC-CLIO. 2004. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://books.google.com/books?id=ZVnuHX_6bG0C&pg=PA176&dq=invented+the+first+semiautomatic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=j8EFUeG4OKLC0QG4-4C4BQ&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%20semiautomatic&f=false
• Kleck, Gary and Gertz, Marc. "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense." Journal of Law and Criminology. 1995. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/kleckandgertz1.htm
• Koper, Christopher S. "Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003." U.S. Department of Justice. July 2004. (Jan. 31, 2014) https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf
• Krouse, William J. "Gun Control Legislation." Congressional Research Service. Nov. 14, 2012. (Jan. 26, 2013) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf
• Limbaugh, Rush. "Limbaugh: The Term "Assault Rifle" Is A "Political Invention." Realclearpolitics.com. Dec. 17, 2012. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/12/17/limbaugh_the_term_assault_rifle_is_a_political_invention.html
• Lindenberger, Michael A. "Ten Years After Columbine, It's Easier to Bear Arms." Time. April 20, 2009. (Jan. 31, 2013) http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1891416,00.html
• Martinez, Michael and Schmidt, Emily. "Gun control advocates march as nation reels from school shootings." Cnn.com. Jan. 26, 2013. (Jan. 26, 2013) http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/26/us/gun-control-rally/index.html
• McIntyre, Douglas A. "Guns in America: Nearly 40 million guns were purchased legally in 2020 and another 4.1 million bought in January. " USA Today. Feb. 10, 2021. (May 30, 2021) https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/02/10/this-is-how-many-guns-were-sold-in-all-50-states/43371461/
• Ministry of the Interior, Finland. "Firearms Act." Finlex.fi. 2003. Jan. 27, 2013. http://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/1998/en19980001.pdf
• Newcomb, Alyssa. "US Gun Homicide Rate Higher Than Other Developed Countries." Abcnews.com. Dec. 18, 2012. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/12/us-gun-ownership-homicide-rate-higher-than-other-developed-countries/
• Newstimes.com. "Teacher from Stratford shielded students." Newstimes.com. Dec. 15, 2012. (Jan. 25, 2013) http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Teacher-from-Stratford-shielded-students-4120759.php
• O'Keefe, Ed. "Lawmakers unveil new assault weapons ban." Washington Post. Jan. 24, 2013. (Jan. 28, 2013) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/01/24/lawmakers-to-unveil-new-assault-weapons-ban/?hpid=z1
• Palazzolo, Joe and Barry, Rob. "More Killings Called Self-Defense." Wall Street Journal. April 2, 2012. (Jan. 30, 2013) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577311873214574462.html
• Peterson, Phillip. "The Gun Digest Buyer's Guide to Assault Weapons." Gun Digest Books. 2008. (Jan. 28, 2013) http://books.google.com/books?id=fd9Qc0neMjYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=history+of+assault+rifles&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GuUBUYfBBqS00QHYy4GIDg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20assault%20rifles&f=false
• Pew Research Center. "Amid a Series of Mass Shootings in the U.S., Gun Policy Remains Deeply Divisive. " Pew Research Center. April 20, 2021. (May 29, 2021) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/04/20/amid-a-series-of-mass-shootings-in-the-u-s-gun-policy-remains-deeply-divisive/
• Raum, Tom and Agiesta, Jennifer. "AP-GfK poll: After Conn. school shooting, nearly 6 in 10 Americans back stricter gun laws." Ap-gfkpoll.com. Jan. 16, 2013. (Jan. 26, 2013) http://ap-gfkpoll.com/uncategorized/our-latest-poll-findings-19
• Saad, Lydia. "Americans Want Stricter Gun Laws, Still Oppose Bans." Gallup. Dec. 12, 2012. (Feb. 15, 2018) http://news.gallup.com/poll/159569/americans-stricter-gun-laws-oppose-bans.aspx
• Saad, Lydia. "What Percentage of Americans Own Guns? " Gallup. Nov. 13, 2020. (May 30, 2021) https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx
• Saltzman, L.E. et al. "Weapon involvement and injury outcomes in family and intimate assaults." Journal of the American Medical Association. June 10, 1992. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1588718
• Schneider, Ari. "3D-Printed Guns Are Getting More Capable and Accessible. " Slate. Feb. 16, 2021. (May 30, 2021) https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/3d-printed-semi-automatic-rifle-fgc-9.html
• ScienceDaily. "Protection Or Peril? Gun Possession Of Questionable Value In An Assault, Study Finds." Sciencedaily.com. Sept. 30, 2009 (Jan. 27, 2013) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930121512.htm
• ScienceDaily. "Regulation And Oversight Of Gun Sales Reduces Trafficking To Criminals, Study Finds." Sciencedaily.com. July 7, 2009. (Jan. 28, 2013) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090707111749.htm
• Small Arms Survey. "Completing the Count." Smallarmssurvey.org. 2007. (Jan. 27, 2013) http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2007/en/full/Small-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-EN.pdf
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What Questions Should Humans Be Asking about Nuclear Weapons?

In June 2023, we asked ChatGPT this question. Here is its exact response — unedited, uncorrected, uncanny

Question : What questions should humans be asking about nuclear weapons?

ChatGPT Answer:  Nuclear weapons are one of the most destructive and deadly weapons ever created, and their existence poses a significant threat to global security. Here are some questions that humans should be asking about nuclear weapons:

• How can we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? This includes preventing nuclear war, accidental detonations, and unauthorized access to nuclear weapons.
• What are the risks associated with nuclear weapons? This includes the potential for nuclear accidents, the environmental and health impacts of nuclear testing and use, and the geopolitical risks associated with nuclear proliferation.
• What role should nuclear weapons play in national security strategies? Is it ethical to possess and potentially use such destructive weapons, and what are the potential consequences of doing so?
• How can we reduce the global nuclear weapons stockpile? This includes arms control agreements, disarmament efforts, and the safe and secure storage and disposal of nuclear materials.
• How can we address the challenges posed by emerging technologies, such as hypersonic missiles, in the context of nuclear weapons?
• How can we improve international cooperation and dialogue on nuclear weapons? This includes diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions and increase transparency between nuclear-armed states.

These are just a few examples of the many questions that humans should be asking about nuclear weapons. It is important to have ongoing discussions and evaluations of nuclear weapons policies and strategies to ensure that we are reducing the risks associated with these weapons and moving towards a more peaceful and secure world.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence-powered language model developed by OpenAI.

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Five Questions About Nukes To Ask at the Next Debate

Three minutes’ discussion among two candidates is a pitiful amount of time to devote to a truly existential threat..

On Tuesday night, nuclear weapons took center stage at one of the televised debates between Democratic presidential hopefuls — if only for three minutes. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Steve Bullock squared off, briefly, over a moderator’s query about whether the United States should introduce a policy to never use nuclear weapons first. Senator Warren has made this a cornerstone of her national-security platform; in January, she introduced a “no-first-use” bill in conjunction with House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith. 

Warren crushed the question, responding that such a policy “makes the world safer” by reducing the chance of catastrophic miscalculation in a crisis. Not unrelatedly, she noted that President Trump is adding new types of nuclear weapons to the U.S. arsenal and expanding their role in U.S. military doctrine. 

Related: Nuclear Weapons Are Getting Less Predictable, and More Dangerous

Related: nuclear experts beg congress to push back on trump administration’s ‘dangerous impulses’, related: poll: americans want to stay in nuclear arms control agreements.

Governor Bullock responded with hawkish––mostly Republican––talking points, saying that he wouldn’t want to take a pre-emptive nuclear strike off the table. He also disingenuously suggested that a no-first-use policy would allow North Korea to nuke Detroit without any repercussions, a truly mind-boggling statement. 

Certainly, questions about nuclear issues are welcome at these debates , yet those hoping for a substantial and necessary discussion about U.S. nuclear policy were largely disappointed. Even the question itself, posed by CNN’s Jake Tapper, was framed poorly, using the hawkish talking point that having a no-first-use policy might “tie the US’ hands.” 

The greatest immediate existential threat to humanity deserves more thoughtful questions and answers––and certainly more than three minutes of debate. Here are five nuclear-policy questions that future debate moderators ought to ask every candidate:

What is your plan to stop the global arms race? Nuclear tensions are the highest they’ve been since the Cold War, in no small part thanks to Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and his promise to build new nuclear weapons. His administration is also killing arms control treaties left and right, and will officially withdraw from the landmark INF Treaty this Friday. A new administration must diplomatically re-engage with both adversaries and allies in an attempt to defuse the arms race. Candidates may differ on their immediate priorities, but reducing nuclear tensions through diplomacy is a must. 

How much should we be spending on nuclear weapons? The Obama administration vowed to replace every weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and now the Trump administration is promising to build even more nukes. If all of these plans come to fruition, the United States will spend nearly $100,000 per minute on its nuclear forces over the next decade. This is obviously unacceptable. Unfortunately, cancelling Trump’s new nukes is just a drop in the bucket; candidates need a vision for re-shaping the U.S. nuclear stockpile that dramatically cuts costs and takes ambitious steps towards a world without nuclear weapons. 

How are you going to confront the nuclear-industrial complex? Surprise, surprise: nuclear policy decisions are largely driven by money and influence––not by security concerns. The “revolving door” between Congress, think tanks, war contractors, and lobbyists has been well-documented , and must be slammed shut. As is her wont, Warren has a plan to do exactly that. Other candidates should follow in her footsteps. 

Should one person have the authority to launch nuclear weapons? Under current policy, a single individual––the President––has the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. Even without an erratic Donald Trump in the Oval Office, this is incredibly dangerous. It’s also wholly unnecessary in a post-Cold War era: the policy was designed to immediately retaliate to a Soviet surprise attack, but today, a Russian “bolt-from-the-blue” nuclear strike has become totally implausible. Analysts have offered a variety of options to reform nuclear launch authority; candidates should pick one and run with it. 

How will you provide justice to victims of U.S. nuclear testing, bombings, and radiation? Nuclear weapons have done irreparable harm to vulnerable communities and environments, on both foreign and domestic soil. The United States has a moral imperative to mitigate decades of nuclear oppression by providing economic reparations, environmental remediation, and humanitarian assistance to frontline communities affected by U.S. nuclear policies. People are still suffering from nuclear tests that took place fifty years ago, and candidates need to be pushed on how they plan to fix this. 

These questions need to be asked, and indeed voters want them to be asked. Over 80 percent of respondents to recent polls in Iowa and New Hampshire ––where the first two Democratic primaries will be held––said they wanted to hear candidates’ views on nuclear weapons. So when the candidates gather in Texas on Sept. 12 and 13, moderators should ensure that nuclear matters get quite a bit longer than three minutes. Perhaps they will even let every candidate weigh in. 

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100 Critical Questions for Gun Violence Research

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The Joyce Foundation released a new report in January 2021 on the next generation of gun violence prevention research, identifying new paths of inquiry into reducing gun deaths and injuries in America.

The report, " The Next 100 Questions: A Research Agenda for Ending Gun Violence ," outlines key areas of focus for public and private sector efforts to build the science of gun violence prevention with actionable findings for policy makers and practitioners over the next five years. The report was written in collaboration with an advisory panel of scientific experts and includes input from dozens of researchers in the field.

Against the backdrop of a national surge of gun violence and gun purchasing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the report arrives at a moment of optimism for gun violence research efforts. Congress recently renewed $25 million in funding for those efforts, and the incoming federal administration has committed to comprehensively addressing gun violence as a public health epidemic.

The renewed federal funding into gun violence research is a good start, but there is much more to learn about reducing gun deaths and injuries in the U.S. The report identifies key questions in 10 dimensions of gun violence:

1) Firearm suicide 2) Community-based gun violence 3) Intimate partner violence 4) Shootings by law enforcement 5) Mass shootings 6) Unintentional shootings 7) Impacts of lawful gun ownership 8) Gun access during high-risk periods 9) Racial disparities and the criminal justice system 10) Firearm-related technology. The Joyce Foundation is a nonpartisan private foundation that invests in public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region. Through our Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform program, the Foundation has supported research and policy change to reduce gun violence for more than 25 years .

Questions about this report can be addressed to [email protected] .

About The Joyce Foundation

Joyce is a nonpartisan, private foundation that invests in evidence-informed public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region.

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Gun Violence in America: The 13 Key Questions (With 13 Concise Answers)

It's not like no one has ever asked them before. There's data everywhere and decades of research. We tracked down the best of it so you don't have to. 

Jump to a question:

How much gun violence is there in the U.S.?

How many guns are there in the U.S.?

How do mass shootings differ from other types of gun violence?

What gun control laws currently exist?

What could be done to reduce gun violence?

Would fewer guns result in less gun violence?

• Would gun control result in fewer guns?

How often are guns used in self-defense?

Won't criminals kill with other weapons if they don't have guns?

What has worked to reduce gun violence?

Are the White House proposals likely to be effective?

How does the U.S. compare to other countries?

What don't we know yet?

There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI . This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm. 6,220 of those homicides by firearm (72%) are known to have involved a handgun.

It's worth noting that violent crime rates of all types have been steadily decreasing since the early 1990s. No one is quite sure what is causing this decrease, though there are many theories , ranging from tighter gun control laws to more innovative policing and changes in the drug market. Whatever the cause of this decline, America still has a homicide rate of 4.7 murders per 100,000 people, which is one of the highest of all developed countries (see: international comparison).

Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars .

Guns are also involved in suicides and accidents. 19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC . There were 606 firearm-related accidents in the same year -- about 5% of the number of intentional gun deaths.

There are about 310 million guns in the country . About 40% of households have them, a fraction that has been slowly declining over the last few decades, down from about 50% in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the overall number of guns has increased to about one gun per person, up from one gun for every two persons in the 1960s. This means that gun ownership has gotten much more concentrated among fewer households: if you own one gun, you probably own several. America has the highest rate of gun ownership of any country in the world, by a wide margin (see: international comparison).

( More : A long running poll by Gallup ; the wide-ranging General Social Survey ; a New York Times demographic breakdown by Nate Silver)

The FBI defines a "mass murder" as four or more murders during the same incident. This is an arbitrary number, but a dividing line is useful when asking whether there are differences between mass shootings and other kinds of gun violence. The most comprehensive public list of U.S. mass shootings is the spreadsheet of 62 incidents from 1982-2012, compiled by Mother Jones . Their list shows:

• Mass shootings happen all over the country .
• Killers used a semi-automatic handgun in 75% of incidents, which is about the same percentage as the 72% in overall gun violence.
• Killers used an assault weapon in 40% of incidents. This is much higher than overall assault weapon use in crimes, estimated at less than 2%.
• The guns were obtained legally in 79% of mass shootings.
• Many of the shooters showed signs of mental illness, but in only two cases was there a prior diagnosis.
• There were no cases where an armed civilian fired back.

2012 was the worst year in American history, in terms of total victims. A graph of yearly victims shows a slight upward trend. But the pattern is a lot less clear without the 2012 peak, and because yearly numbers vary so widely, it's likely that there will be many fewer victims next year.

Several criminologists deny that mass shootings are increasing. Although these incidents dominate headlines and conversation, it's important to remember that they account for only a small fraction of gun violence in the United States. For example, the spike of 72 deaths in 2012 includes only 0.8% of all firearm-related homicides in 2011 (the last year for which statistics are available.) Many gun deaths, especially in large cities, never make the news . This means that the most effective gun violence reduction strategies -- in terms of lives saved -- might not target mass shootings at all.

There are two major federal laws that regulate firearm ownership and sales. The National Firearms Act of 1934 restricts civilians from owning automatic weapons, short-barreled shotguns, hand grenades, and other powerful arms. The Gun Control Act of 1968 focuses on commerce. It prohibits mail-order sales of weapons, and requires anyone in the business of selling guns to be federally licensed and keep permanent sales records. It also prohibits knowingly selling a gun to those with prior criminal records, minors, individuals with mental health problems, and a few other categories of people.

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 requires licensed gun dealers to perform background checks. Background checks are not required for private gun sales (though, as mentioned above, it's still a crime to knowingly sell a gun to someone with a criminal record). To ensure privacy, Section 103(i) of the Act prevents the Federal government from keeping the names submitted for background checks, or using this information to create any sort of registry of gun owners.

From 1994 to 2004, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban prohibited the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons (in which each pull of the trigger fires one shot) with various military features such as large-capacity magazines and pistol grips. It was still legal to keep previously owned weapons. The law expired in 2004 due to a built-in "sunset" clause.

These federal laws set minimum standards, but many states have also passed various types of gun laws. These laws determine which weapons are legal to own, and also set requirements on sales, background checks, storage, open and concealed carrying permits, and sentencing of gun-related crimes.

( More: Gun Laws in the US, State by State , The Guardian , and Gun Control Legislation , Congressional Research Service)

The firearms debate usually revolves around "gun control" -- that is, laws that would make guns harder to buy, carry, or own. But this is not the only way of reducing gun violence. It is possible to address gun use instead of availability. For example, Project Exile moved all gun possession offenses in Richmond, Virginia, to federal courts instead of state courts, where minimum sentences are longer. Policies like these, which concern gun use, are sometimes said to operate on gun "demand," as opposed to gun control laws, which affect "supply."

Similarly, while the idea of new laws gets most of the attention, some projects have focused on enforcing existing laws more effectively, or changing policing strategies the way Boston's Operation Ceasefire did in the 1990s. In fact, launching community-based programs has proven to be one of the most effective strategies for reducing gun violence. (See: What has worked , below.)

There have also been programs based on other principles, such as public safety education and gun buy-back campaigns. The White House proposals (see below ) address both gun access and gun use, and include both new laws and enhanced enforcement of existing laws.

( More: Aiming for Evidence-based Gun Policy , Phillip Cook and Jens Ludwig)

Suppose it were possible to reduce the number of guns in circulation, or make it harder for people to get a gun. Would gun violence go down?

Although countries that offer easier access to guns also have more gun violence , at least among developed nations, this doesn't necessarily mean that more guns cause more deaths . People may own more guns in dangerous places because they want to protect themselves. It's also possible that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime, because criminals must consider the possibility that their intended victim is armed.

Economist John Lott did extensive work on this question in the late 1990s, culminating in his 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime . He studied the effect of right-to-carry laws by examining violent crime rates before and after they were implemented in various states, up until 1992, and concluded that such laws decreased homicides by an average of 8%. Lott's data and methods have been extensively reviewed since then. A massive 2004 report by a 16-member panel of the National Research Council found that there was not enough evidence to say either way whether right-to-carry laws affected violence. In 2010, different researchers re-examined Lott's work, the NRC report, and additional data up through 2006, and reaffirmed that there is no evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime.

Meanwhile, other studies have suggested that reduced access to guns would result in less crime. These studies compared homicide rates with gun availability in various states and cities. The most comprehensive estimate is that a 10% reduction in U.S. households with guns would result in a 3% reduction in homicides. Internationally , the effect of reductions in gun ownership might be much larger. This might have to do with the large number of guns already available in the U.S.: Any reduction in gun violence hinges on whether gun control laws would actually make it prohibitively difficult to get a gun.

( More: Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts , Factcheck.org; The Impact of Right to Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy , John J. Donohue III, Abhay Aneja, and Alexandria Zhang)

Does gun control result in fewer guns?

In principle, it's not necessary to keep guns away from everyone , just those who would misuse them. Background checks are promising because a high fraction of future killers already have a criminal record. In one study in Illinois, 71% of those convicted of homicide had a previous arrest, and 42% had a prior felony conviction.

Yet current federal gun regulation (see above) contains an enormous loophole: While businesses that deal in guns are required to keep records and run background checks, guns can be transferred between private citizens without any record. This makes straw purchases easy. In other words, these laws may generally make guns harder to come by, but those who really want them can still obtain them through private sales.

Also, although it's generally illegal to sell guns across state lines, in practice this is very common. There's abundant evidence that under the current system, guns flow easily between legal and illegal markets. Washington, D.C,. banned all handguns in 1976, and Chicago did the same in 1982. In neither case did the percentage of suicides using firearms -- considered a very good proxy for general gun availability -- fall significantly.

Similarly, Illinois had a background check requirement before 1994, so the local gun market was not affected by the passage of the Brady Act, but gun trace data shows that criminals simply switched from smuggling guns from out of state to buying them illegally in state.

( More : Where 50,000 Guns Recovered in Chicago Came From , New York Times )

There are no comprehensive records kept of incidents where guns are used in self-defense, so the only way to know is to ask people. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey suggest that a gun is used in self-defense about 60,000 to 120,000 times each year . Several other surveys confirm this estimate. By comparison, each year about a million violent crimes involve guns. This means guns are used to commit a crime about 10 times as often as they are used for self-defense.

A few surveys in the early 1990s suggested that there are millions gun self-defense incidents each year, but there are very good reasons to believe that these estimates were improperly calculated and these numbers are way off , more than 10 times too high. If the numbers really were this high, this would imply that pretty much every gunshot wound in America is the result of somebody protecting him or herself.

Even among the more accurate surveys, according to a panel of criminal court judges who reviewed survey respondents' stories, about half the time the gun use was "probably illegal," even assuming the gun itself had been purchased legally.

( More : Gun threats and self-defense gun use , Harvard Injury Control Research Center)

The crux of this question is whether most homicides are planned, or whether killers more often confront their victims with no clear intention. In the second case, adding a gun could result in a fatal shooting that would otherwise have been avoided.

The evidence that weapon does matter goes back decades. In 1968, Franklin Zimring examined cases of knife assaults versus gun assaults in Chicago. The gun attacks were five times more deadly. Moreover, the two sets of attacks were similar in all other dimensions: age, sex, race, whether the victim knew the assailant beforehand, and so forth. A few years later, he repeated his analysis, this time comparing small and large caliber guns. As expected, the victim was much more likely to die from larger caliber guns.

Although it is surely true that a determined killer cannot be stopped by the absence of a gun, this type of evidence indicates that many homicides are unplanned. The outcome depends, at least partially, on the weapon at hand. In that restricted sense, guns do kill people.

( More: Crime is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America , by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins)

This is not an easy question to answer, because crime rates can decline for a wide range of reasons . For example, violent crime rates declined sharply all across the country in the mid-1990s, regardless of whether a given area had tightened its gun laws. So based on a naive interpretation of the numbers, any attempt at reducing gun violence in 1995 would have appeared successful by 1998. Then there is the problem of comparing different states or cities: Circumstances differ, and what works in Memphis may fail in Detroit.

Nonetheless, there are some plausible methods for isolating the different factors, using comparison groups or other controls . The most thorough summary is a 2008 meta-analysis where the authors reviewed every prior American gun violence reduction study, examining both the reported effectiveness and the strength of the statistical evidence. Here are some approaches that don't seem to work, at least not by themselves, or in the ways they've been tried so far:

• Stiffer prison sentences for gun crimes.
• Gun buy-backs: In a country with one gun per person, getting a few thousand guns off the street in each city may not mean very much.
• Safe storage laws and public safety campaigns.

We don't really have good enough evidence to evaluate these strategies:

• Background checks, such as the Brady Act requires.
• Bans on specific weapons types, such as the expired 1994 assault weapons ban or the handgun bans in various cities.

These policies do actually seem to reduce gun violence, at least somewhat or in some cases:

• More intensive probation strategies: increased contact with police, probation officers and social workers.
• Changes in policing strategies, such increased patrols in hot spots .
• Programs featuring cooperation between law enforcement, community leaders, and researchers, such as Project Safe Neighborhoods .

There is no obvious solution here, and there's a huge amount we still don't know . But it's possible that combinations of these policies, or variations in a different context, might work better. For example, background checks would probably be more effective if they were also applied to private sales. Also, of course, this list does not include policies that have not yet been tried.

As one group of researchers put it ,

There are no feasible policies that would reduce the rate of gun violence in the United States to that of Western Europe. But we believe there are ways to make a substantial dent in the problem.

( More: The Effectiveness of Policies and Programs That Attempt to Reduce Firearm Violence: A Meta-Analysis , Journalist's Resource. Project Safe Neighborhoods and Violent Crime Trends in US Cities: Assessing Violent Crime Impact , Edmund F. McGarrell, Nicholas Corsaro, Natalie Kroovand Hipple, Timothy S. Bynum)

There is no way to know whether the recent White House proposals will be effective in reducing gun violence. How can there be, when it's so difficult to assess the actual policies that have already been tried, let alone vague plans? But the White House proposals do at least plausibly target several components of the gun violence problem.

Probably the most significant proposal is the idea of requiring background checks for gun sales between private individuals, not just from licensed dealers (with some exceptions, such as transfers within a family). Private sales are currently the main way guns move between legal and illegal owners. However, the White House has yet to specify how a private seller would perform such a check.

There is less evidence for the effectiveness of banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. During the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban, the use of assault weapons in crimes fell, but use of large-capacity magazines increased . This is thought to be largely due to the huge number of already-owned LCMs, which were exempt from the ban on manufacturing and sales. If the new law does not address the LCMs already in private hands, it may be decades before it has any real effect.

Removing legal restrictions that prevent the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies from tracking and researching gun violence is also a sensible idea, and follows a long history of calls from scientists (see: what don't we know ).

The U.S. has one of the highest rates of violent crime and homicide, per capita, of any developed country. According to 2008 figures compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the U.S. homicide rate for 2010 is 5.1 per 100,000 people. Only Estonia's is higher, at 6.3. The next most violent country is Finland, which has a homicide rate of 2.5, half that of the U.S. The remaining 28 developed countries are even lower, with an average of 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people.

But many less developed countries have much higher homicide rates -- for example Columbia (35.9), South Africa (36.8) and Sudan (24.2). This analysis uses the 2012 IMF list of developed countries.

The U.S. also has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, by far. The best data is from the 2007 Small Arms Survey , which notes:

With less than 5% of the world's population, the United States is home to roughly 35-50 per cent of the world's civilian-owned guns, heavily skewing the global geography of firearms and any relative comparison.

U.S. gun violence has had several decades-long cycles over the past three centuries, but shows a long-term downward trend. Overall homicide rates were similar to Western Europe until the 1850s , but since then violence has declined more slowly in the U.S.

It's tempting to plot the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence across countries, but recent research suggests that gun violence is shaped by "socio-historical and cultural context," which varies regionally, meaning that it's not always possible to make direct comparisons. However, it's still reasonable to compare places with similar histories, and more guns still correlate with more homicides in Western nations. Meanwhile, in developing countries, cities with more guns have more homicides .

( More: Chart: The U.S. has far more gun-related killings than any other developed country , The Washington Post; Facebook post says the U.S. is No. 1 in gun violence. Is it? , Politifact' Gun homicides and gun ownership listed by country , Guardian Data Blog)

A lot! We lack some of the most basic information we need to have a sensible gun policy debate, partially because researchers have been prevented by law from collecting it. The 2004 National Research Council report discussed above identified several key types of missing data : systematic reporting of individual gun incidents and injuries, gun ownership at the local level, and detailed information on the operation of firearms markets. We don't even have reliable data on the number of homicides in each county.

For such sensitive data sets, it would be important to preserve privacy both legally and technically. There have been recent advances in this area, such as anonymous registries . But the Centers for Disease Control, the main U.S. agency that tracks and studies American injuries and death, has been effectively prevented from studying gun violence , due to a law passed by Congress in 1996.

Similarly, anonymized hospital reporting systems are the main ways we know about many other types of injuries, but the Affordable Care Act prevents doctors from gathering information about their patients' gun use . A 2011 law restricts gun violence research at the National Institutes of Health . The legal language prevents these agencies from using any money "to advocate or promote gun control."

This may not technically rule out basic research, but scientists say it has made the issue so sensitive that key funding agencies will not support their work. They point to grant data as evidence of an effective ban. The White House has recently proposed lifting these research restrictions (see above )

( More: NRA Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say , The New York Times )

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July 5, 2022

What Researchers Know about Gun Policies’ Effectiveness

Studies are “decades behind,” owing to a lack of funding, but research is picking up

By Lynne Peeples & Nature magazine

Gun sales in the United States have been on the rise.

Jon Cherry/Bloomberg via Getty Images

About 40% of the world’s civilian-owned firearms are in the United States, a country that has had some 1.4 million gun deaths in the past four decades. And yet, until recently, there has been almost no federal funding for research that could inform gun policy.

US gun violence is back in the spotlight after mass shootings this May in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. And after a decades-long stalemate on gun controls in the US Congress, lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill that places some restrictions on guns. President Joe Biden signed it into law on 25 June.

The law, which includes measures to enhance background checks and allows review of mental-health records for young people wanting to buy guns, represents the most significant federal action on the issue in decades. Gun-control activists argue that the rules are too weak, whereas advocates of gun rights say there is no evidence that most gun policies will be effective in curbing the rate of firearm-related deaths.

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The latter position is disingenuous, says Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although some evidence, both from the United States and overseas, supports the effectiveness of gun policies, many more studies are needed. “The fact that we have a lot of unanswered questions is intentional,” she says.

The reason, Crifasi says, is mid-1990s legislation that restricted federal funding for gun-violence research and was backed by the US gun lobby — organizations led by the National Rifle Association (NRA) that aim to influence policy on firearms. Lars Dalseide, a spokesperson for the NRA, responds that the association “did support the Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the CDC [US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control] from using taxpayer dollars to conduct research with an exclusive goal to further a political agenda — gun control.” But he adds that the association has “never opposed legitimate research for studies into the dynamics of violent crime”.

Only in the past few years — after other major mass shootings, including those at schools in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida — has the research field begun to rebuild , owing to an infusion of dollars and the loosening of limitations. “So, our field is much, much smaller than it should be compared to the magnitude of the problem,” Crifasi says. “And we are decades behind where we would be otherwise in terms of being able to answer questions.”

Now, scientists are working to take stock of the data they have and what data they’ll need to evaluate the success of the new legislation and potentially guide stronger future policies.

Among the reforms missing from the new US law, according to gun-safety researchers, is raising the purchasing age for an assault rifle to 21 years. Both the Buffalo and Uvalde gunmen bought their rifles legally at age 18. But making the case for minimum-age policies has been difficult because there are few data to back it up, Crifasi says. “With the limited research dollars available, people were not focusing on them as a research question.”

Gun-violence research is also stymied by gaps in basic data. For example, information on firearm ownership hasn’t been collected by the US government since the mid-2000s, a result of the Tiahrt Amendments. These provisions to a 2003 appropriations bill prohibit the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing firearm-tracing data. For researchers, this means not knowing the total number of guns in any scenario they might be studying. “If we want to understand the rate at which guns become crime guns, or the rate at which guns are used in suicide, and which kind of guns and where, then we have to have that denominator,” says John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC, an independent research institution at the University of Chicago, Illinois.

Accurate counts of gun-violence events — the numerators needed to calculate those rates — are hard to come by, too. The CDC provides solid estimates of gun deaths, researchers note, but the agency hasn’t historically provided important context, such as the kind of weapon used or the relationship between the shooter and victim. Now fully funded, the state-based National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) is beginning to fill in those details. Still, it remains difficult for researchers to study changes over time.

What’s more, most shootings do not result in death, but still have negative impacts on the people involved and should be tracked. Yet CDC data on non-fatal firearm injuries are limited to imperfect summary statistics and are not included in the NVDRS. If researchers were better able to examine shootings beyond firearm deaths, they could have much greater statistical power to evaluate the effects of state and federal laws, Crifasi says. Without enough data, a study might conclude that a gun policy is ineffective even if it actually does have an impact on violence.

“The CDC strives to provide the most timely, accurate data available — including data related to firearm injuries,” says Catherine Strawn, a spokesperson for the agency.

Another complicating factor is that primary sources of gun-violence data — hospitals and police departments — issue statistics that are incomplete and incompatible. Hospitals frequently report intentional gunshot injuries as accidents. “Folks in the ER are not criminal investigators, and they default to saying things are accidents unless they absolutely know for certain that it was an intentional shooting,” Roman says.

Data on gun-related hospital care — which are collected under an agreement between the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, states and industry — can also be difficult for researchers to access. Some states charge for access to their data. “To get the complete set is incredibly expensive for researchers, so no one uses it,” says Andrew Morral, director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research at the RAND Corporation in Washington DC. “The federal government could do better at aggregating data and making it available for research.”

In addition to hospitals, police departments are crucial to the collection of accurate gun-violence data. In 2021, the FBI began requiring all local law-enforcement agencies to report crimes to the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Although users are required to input more-comprehensive data to the system than before, compliance among departments has been low. “You have very, very active data collection at every scene of every traffic accident that involves an injury,” says Philip Alpers, a gun-violence researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia, referring to standard reporting protocols for US paramedics and police. So it’s certainly possible for law-enforcement agencies also to collect information about guns, Alpers adds. But he and others suggest that a culture of gun rights among agency personnel could be disincentivizing them from complying, as well as a lack of financial support for adapting to the new system.

The FBI did not respond to Nature ’s queries about the reporting system.

Looking for lessons from abroad

Researchers emphasize that the call for more data and research is no reason to delay implementing gun controls. After all, some data do exist, from international studies on gun safety and from state- and privately funded US investigations, that could guide policymakers.

For instance, in Israel, policy changes that restrict military personnel from bringing their weapons home resulted in reductions in gun suicides. And after a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Australia, in 1996, officials imposed a suite of gun regulations centred around a massive buyback programme. The country approximately halved its rates of gun homicides and suicides over the following seven years. It also had no mass shootings in the subsequent 2 decades, compared with 13 such incidents in the 18 years leading up to the massacre.

Still, these successes might not translate to the United States. “Could America do what Australia did? The answer is no, not a chance. You’ve got too many guns [in the US],” Alpers says. “You have to separate America from the rest of the world.” And, with the prospect of tightened regulation on the horizon, US firearm ownership seems to be rising: gun stores around the country are seeing increased sales.

“We can learn from [other countries’ experiences],” Roman says. “But that seems so far outside of any reasonable expectation of where US policy is headed.” In other words, the United States needs more research.

Slow, belated progress

The good news is that data collection in the United States has been on the rise since the influx of federal funding. Researchers and others will meet at the first National Research Conference on Firearms Injury Prevention, planned for later this year.

This revived interest in gun-safety research will bolster the sparse efforts across the country that relied mainly on state and private funds. For instance, California initiated a restriction on assault weapons in 1989, and has since layered on other regulations, such as universal background checks and red-flag laws that allow police, family members, employers, co-workers and school employees to petition the court to temporarily separate a person from their firearms.

For the past 22 years, California’s gun-death rate has been trending downwards , explains Garen Wintemute, an emergency-medicine physician at the University of California, Davis. In 2020, the overall rate across the other 49 states was around 64% higher than the rate in California. Although it is difficult to tease apart the impacts of individual laws, the sum total seems to be working. “I suspect that they acted synergistically: where one law wasn’t effective, the other one stepped in,” Wintemute says.

A similarly layered approach successfully targeted US car crashes. For decades, motor-vehicle accidents were the most common cause of death among young people. But investments in research and the resulting evidence-based regulations put a major dent in those numbers. “It wasn’t one thing: we did seat belts, we did airbags, we did improvements to the roads,” says Rebecca Cunningham, a gun-violence researcher at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “We got less drunk driving. It was all these layers of public-health protection on top of each other.”

Raising the legal age to drink from 18 to 21 helped to reduce the number of young drunk drivers. Cunningham sees a similar potential precedent for raising the legal age to buy a rifle.

But funding for gun-violence research has been a fraction of that invested in traffic safety — nearly fourfold fewer dollars per life lost. In 2020, gun violence surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death among US children and young adults.

“For 20 years, we turned our back on the health problem and declined to do research on it,” Wintemute says. “How many thousands of people are dead today who would be alive if that research had been allowed to continue?”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 1 2022.