America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained
The factors that lead to tragedies like the Lewiston shooting are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.
At least 18 people have been killed and more than a dozen injured in a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, the northern state’s second-largest city.
The shooter wasn’t immediately apprehended and appears to have opened fire at two locations on Wednesday evening: a bowling alley and a bar. State and local law enforcement asked residents of Lewiston and the surrounding area to shelter in place as officials worked to find the shooter. Schools and many businesses in the area have been shuttered.
The shooter, whose picture has been shared as part of the search effort, is believed to be a 40-year-old white man who worked as a firearms teacher and a US Army reservist. He is facing eight counts of murder so far, according to Maine state police.
The Lewiston shooting was one of several hundred mass shootings this year; and it follows a number of other mass shootings this week, including in Colorado, Chicago, and Louisiana. This kind of violence is unique to the US and should not be normalized.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 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. There have been 565 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late October, including the Lewiston shooting, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.
Despite that sheer carnage, however, 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. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’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 before federal lawmakers take further action. In that absence, 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.
The US has a lot of guns, and more guns mean more gun deaths
It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws, and people can manufacture their own guns with DIY kits or 3D printers. The gun lobby has also vehemently opposed federal legislation to track gun sales and establish a national handgun registry.
One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US 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, though the 2018 estimate remains the most recent available. There has also been a significant increase in the number of guns manufactured and imported in the years since. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.
https://www.vox.com/23142734/lewiston-m ... s-shooting