Local Opinion: The statistical argument for gun control

Numbers don’t lie. People do. This thought came to mind while contemplating the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. So let’s look at some numbers related to guns, mass shootings and deaths in the U.S., comparing them to those in the rest of the world.

In the U.S., there are about 330 million people and 410 million guns, or about 121 guns per 100 people, up from 88 per 100 in 2011. The per capita number of guns is growing at a rate exceeding that of the population, with a sharp upswing during the Trump administration. In western Europe, gun ownership averages about 19 per 100 people. The global mean is roughly half that because many nations impose severe restrictions. Gun ownership in the U.S. is roughly 12 times the global average. No other country in the world even approaches that.

Per-capita gun ownership is a statistically significant predictor of gun death rates. Put simply, if there are millions of guns in the hands of millions of people, there will be a high incidence of gun-related homicides, suicides and accidents in comparison to a population of equal size where guns are not so prevalent.

In 2020, more than 45,000 people died from gun-related injuries, including more than 19,000 who were murdered, an increase of nearly 35% from 2019. Suicides by firearm were even higher, over 24,000. With only 5% of the world’s population, the US owns 46% of the world’s guns.

Between 1968 and 2017, 1.5 million Americans died in gun-related incidents, exceeding the number of American soldiers killed in all our wars.

The prevalence of guns in the U.S. is particularly hard on women. Intimate partners with access to firearms are five times more likely to kill their victims than those without them. In 2015, 92% of all women killed with guns in high-income countries were from the U.S.

In mass shootings, defined as four or more people killed in a single, public event, the U.S. accounted for 101 from 1998-2019. Germany was next, with six. However defined, mass shootings have become more common over the past five years compared to the preceding five.

Ready availability of military-style assault rifles like the AR-15 makes our mass shootings much more deadly than those elsewhere. This is the type of weapon used in some of our worst (e.g., Las Vegas).

The AR-15 is based on the magazine-fed, semi-automatic M-16 used in Vietnam. Banned from 1994 to 2004, eight to 10 million are in circulation today. As it passes through human flesh, a .223-caliber round generates a shockwave that shreds soft tissue, explodes organs, splinters bones, blows off heads, arms and legs, and leaves an exit wound as big as a grapefruit. In short, the AR-15 is a weapon of war, designed to kill as many enemy soldiers as quickly as possible. It has no other purpose.

Surveys show broad popular support for universal background checks and curtailing sales of assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, yet none of those provisions are part of the current bipartisan deal.

The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, when flintlock muskets and rifles had a maximum firing rate of four rounds a minute. A semi-automatic rifle can fire up to 750 rounds a minute. The Framers surely never envisioned the kind of mindless, hate-driven mass destruction that plagues the country today. Nor did they consider the Constitution to be more than a living document to be modified as the nation evolved.

Reasonable steps would be to regulate possession of all firearms, restore the ban on sale of semi-automatic rifles and initiate government buybacks of those already in private hands. We should heed the experience of other nations like Australia where a reduction in firearms resulted in much lower murder, suicide and accident rates.

At present, the highest gun-related death rate in the world is the price we pay for the paranoia that drives opposition to gun control.