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America is truly an exceptional nation.
It's not because of our education system, our economy or our scientific establishment.
No, America is really only exceptional when it comes to the number of guns, the frequency of gun murders, and the shockingly high number of annual gun deaths.
Other countries don't have the problems that the United States does. Other industrialized countries don't have tens of thousands of gun deaths per year, or regular mass shootings, or a population as armed as it is violent.
Other countries don't have America's gun problem.
Here, we take a look at the data that shows why America is so unlike the rest of the world when it comes to the popularity and the abuse of guns. We'll look at the role that policy-makers play in the gun control debate, and we'll look at what can be done.
It isn't pretty, but it's important. Hundreds of thousands of American lives hang in the balance.
When Americans kill one another, they usually use a gun. In fact, Americans use guns to murder each other twice as often as they use any other murder weapons.
At the current rate, 339,000 Americans will die by guns over the next 10 years. That is roughly equivalent to the current population of Tampa, Florida.
CDC data, Walter Hickey/BI
As the national rate of gun ownership declines ...
Gun ownership in the U.S. is becoming increasingly consolidated to a minority of households. Household ownership is decreasing even faster than personal ownership.
U.S. civilians control a vast plurality of the world's supply of civilian firearms. There are a shocking 270 million guns in civilian hands in the United States.
Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. This chart shows that the more guns a country has, the more gun deaths a country has. The U.S. takes this relationship to the extreme.
This chart of industrialized nations shows that the U.S. and Mexico — a nation currently engulfed in a widespread, anarchic drug cartel war — stand alone when it comes to gun ownership and gun homicide.
Here's a look by the Small Arms Survey at the relationship between a country's homicide rate and that country's gun homicide rate. You'll notice that for the most part, the non-firearm homicide rate remains roughly even regardless of the total homicide rate. The main driver of the high homicide rate in certain nations is due to gun homicides.
The U.S. has pretty unique gun laws. U.S. federal law says almost anyone can buy a gun, provided they are of age, the gun is not an assault rifle or machine gun, and they are not a felon, fugitive, or non-citizen.
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In the U.K., handguns are illegal and a person needs to get a certificate — and prove they have a good reason — to own a rifle or shotgun. Anyone convicted of a crime cannot touch a gun for 5 years. There are 0.07 gun homicides per every 100,000 people.
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In Canada, a person must wait 60 days to buy a gun. A person applying for a mandatory license must take a training course, notify next-of-kin, have several references and pass a rigorous background check. There are 0.5 gun homicides per every 100,000 people.
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In Japan, touching a gun without a license can result in 10 years in prison. To obtain a rifle or shotgun, a citizen must undergo an exhaustive application process involving several exams, health tests, police authorization, background checks, and the installation of a safe. There are 122 million people in Japan. In 2008, there were 11 gun homicides. In 2006 there were 2.
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Australia is an interesting case. Following the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, which left 35 people dead, the Conservative-led government banned all automatic and semi-automatic weapons, and mandated licensing involving background checks and waiting periods. The government also instituted a gun buyback program, where 650,000 weapons were voluntarily handed in for $360 million.
Scene from the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996
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The result? A major drop in gun deaths, suicides, and homicides. Australia had 30 gun homicides in 2010, 0.13 gun deaths for each 100,000 people.
In contrast, the U.S. has a gun homicide rate of 3 per 100,000 — six times as large as Canada, 23 times as large as Australia, 43 times as large as the U.K., and more than 300 times as large as Japan.
Walter Hickey / BI
How did it get to this point?
A woman waits to hear about her sister, a teacher, following a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northeast of New York City, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. An official with knowledge of Friday's shooting said 27 people were dead, including 18 children. It was the worst school shooting in the country's history. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)
AP Photo/Jessica Hill
When it comes down to it, the gun debate is a one-sided argument in Washington. There isn't even a token opposition to the juggernaut gun lobby.
Data from Center for Responsive Politics, Chart: Walter Hickey/BI
The gun lobby — led by the NRA — has spent $15 on elections for every $1 spent by the gun control lobby.
Data from Center for Responsive Politics, Chart: Walter Hickey
The NRA claims more than 3 million members. Although that's roughly 1 percent of the country, the active membership claims a lot of electoral influence.
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The NRA also gets a significant amount of money from the gun industry in the form of donations, contributions and fundraising assistance.
The NRA also used its influence to gut the ability of the CDC from doing any sort of research on the impact of firearms on human injury and death, deliberately making it harder to conduct scientific research.
Actually, probably not. There's just no evidence to support that. A 2008 paper by American University professors Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey found "A review of both aggregate studies and experimental evidence does not provide support for the supposition that exposure to media violence causes criminally violent behavior"
"The study of most consequence for violent crime policy," they wrote, "actually found that exposure to media violence was significantly negatively related to violent crime rates at the aggregate level "
"Most studies on which reviewers have been relying for their conclusions are decades old and they do not employ modern statistical methods to estimate effects," they wrote. "Programs such as Batman and Bonanza were used as the high-violence shows."
A landmark 1986 paper by Steven Messner — which originally set out to prove violent media was linked to real-world violence — found that exposure to television was actually consistently was linked to reduced real-world violence across the board.
But a survey of mass shooting incidents found that more than twice as many people shot and significantly more people killed when an assault weapon was used. However, the proposed assault weapon ban was dropped from the reform package after it became clear it wouldn't pass the Senate.
Other proposals included a ban on high capacity magazines, like the one used at the mass shooting that left former Rep. Gabby Giffords wounded. This too was dropped from the reform package.
A 1999 study of recent ATF investigations found that rampant abuse of the "gun show loophole" — in which a person who cannot buy a gun does so at a gun show, where background checks aren't necessary.
You'd think it would be reasonable to ensure that everyone buying a gun is subject to the same rules, but the motion to require background checks on gun show purchases failed in the Senate, 6 votes shy of hitting the mandatory 60 votes.
Probably nothing. If the most rudimentary possible reforms are shut down immediately because there are not 60 votes for gun control, then there's really no hope for federal reforms.
