About Gun Violence in America – Listen to the Scientists

As of May 26, 2022, the United States has had 214 mass shootings in the first 156 days of the year. In the last ten days, shooters have targeted a Taiwanese church with congregants in California, a supermarket in a black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in a small town in Texas. The US is the gun-killing leader of the world, surpassing in total collectively the top thirty to forty countries that follow it.

In almost every other country on the planet, there is regulation around access to firearms. Even in Canada, sitting on the edge of the US which makes us more susceptible to gun culture, to get one you have to apply for a firearms license, take a safety course, then fill out an application and wait to see if you get approved. Then you can go and shop for a handgun. To get an AR-15, the gun that seems to be the choice of mass killers in the US, however, you need to go through more rigorous screening processes.

Approximately 2.2 million Canadians out of a population of 37 million have a gun license. In Toronto, a city of 2.7 million, less than 40,000 have gun licenses. Fewer actually own a gun but of those many own more than one.

Even if you have a permit to own a gun, in Canada it is a crime to buy, sell, or own a growing list of banned weapons, and it is illegal to carry a loaded one for personal protection.

According to a global gun violence database kept by the University of Washington, the US doesn’t have the highest number of gun deaths per 100,000. But 2019 data shows a rate of 3.96 per 100,000. By comparison, Canada’s is 0.47, and the UK’s is 0.04. Where are gun death rates higher than in the US? Refer to the chart that follows.

The high rate of gun deaths in the Americas, as seen in the above chart, has much to do with the illicit drug trade with cartels working to control personal channels to markets in the US, the prime customer. These numbers dwarf most of the rest of the world. Not even countries wracked by armed conflict produce similar statistics to those found in the Americas and the US. Countries like El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico have soaring gun death rates. But go overseas and the numbers are far different. For example, Lebanon in 2019 recorded 1.35 gun deaths per 100,000, a third of the US number. Afghanistan was at 1.13, Syria at 1.00, and Yemen with an ongoing civil war, a mere 0.77.

In an article entitled “We know what the problem is” appearing on May 26, 2022, in the journal Science, H. Holden Thorp writes, “The common thread in all of the country’s [US] revolting mass shootings is the absurdly easy access to guns. The science is clear: Restrictions work, and it’s likely that even more limitations would save thousands of lives. So why not take the laws much further…the alternative is painfully obvious—living with more and more senseless carnage, courtesy of the National Rifle Association and their well-funded political lackeys.” 

The common defence by those who argue in favour of gun ownership is that shooters suffer from severe mental illness. the solution is better health care to identify violent-prone people before they become shooters. But the US doesn’t own more mentally ill people than any other country on the planet. And in those countries mass shootings are rare. That’s because the problem is access to guns.

Then there is Senator Ted Cruz, Republican, Texas, who blamed school policy for the mass shooting this week in an elementary school. If there was only one access door to the school with an armed guard always present, Cruz stated, there would have been no mass killing. So it’s not the access to guns, it’s the unlocked doors. I wonder if the Senator consulted with fire department regulators before making his revelation. It should be noted that Cruz has received more than a half-million dollars in campaign donations from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other gun lobbyists.

Another argument is that regulations won’t stop people from getting a gun. But here too, statistics from 2017 show that gun ownership prohibitions and restrictions on concealed carry permits reduce acts of gun violence.

Thorp writes about the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment as the covenant held up by the NRA and gun rights owners as sacred. The argument is you can’t change one word of the Constitution about guns but you can about making it illegal to own a slave, or ending voting prohibition for women. Thorp states “it needs to be decided that unfettered gun ownership by American citizens is not consistent with a flourishing country where people can worship, shop, and be educated without fear.”

Scientists that study public health issues and collect and analyze the data know that guns are the differentiator leading to mass shootings in the country. They know that restrictions on guns would make America safer. They know that mental illness is not the determining factor. Nor is school door policies. It’s guns.