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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

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.

19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC.

there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

For instance, 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they personally own a gun, compared with 20% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Men are more likely than women to say they own a gun (39% vs. 22%).

And 41% of adults living in rural areas report owning a firearm, compared with about 29% of those living in the suburbs and two-in-ten living in cities.

I find that the gun safety debate lacks candor.

People believe it is savvier to tell only part of the truth, to soft-pedal the sell in an effort to get something — anything — done.

The truth that no one wants to tell — the one that opponents of gun safety laws understand and the reason so many of them resist new laws — is that no one law or single package of laws will be enough to solve America’s gun violence problem.

Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ

He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.

he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,

Let's begin with a comparison to a previous "uncontrollable" phenomenon of mass American violence: the wave of lynchings in the early 20th century

you'll find many parallels between lynchings and mass killings. First and foremost is the irrationality of the violence, the notion that it's a uncontrollable condition that comes over the killer or killers. Both are a subset of violence in a violent culture carried out by people not considered professional criminals.&nbsp;

lynchings had common catalysts, just like mass shootings do. And in each, individual incidents seem to seed the air and feed each other &nbsp;psychologically. Each new lynching or shooting increases/or increased the odds of the next one, it seems to me. And lynchings were considered just as inevitable and eternal as mass shootings are in America's modern gun culture.

Cities that once ranked among the nation’s deadliest, such as Oakland and Richmond, have seen enormous decreases over the past decade. These are not single-year drops in killings, but declines sustained over multiple years

California has the strongest gun laws in the country, and it’s enacted more than 30 new gun control laws since 2009 alone

Gun homicide rates for all races have fallen, but the drop was largest for black Bay Area residents: a 40% decrease.

White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. Black men are 17 times as likely to be killed with a gun fired by someone else.

Two different demographic groups bear the brunt of escalating gun violence and are most likely to die of a gunshot wound in America: young Black men and older White men.

The vast majority of gun deaths in America are either suicides or homicides, according to federal data, with accidental or undetermined gun deaths representing a small fraction of the overall share.

Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate-partner violence. Some people have approached the possibility of becoming a victim of violence, including anti-Asian hate crime, with what could be characterized as an act of anticipatory trauma: purchasing a firearm. This isn’t unprecedented. Americans have long turned to firearms as both a last (if not first) resort for addressing uncertainty, precarity and insecurity in a country that largely lacks a collective social safety net.

This trauma has a broad toll, unevenly borne. More than 240,000 students (including a disproportionate number of Black students) have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine shooting, while socioeconomically underserved communities of color disproportionately bear the brunt of gun violence. Black boys and young men ages 15 to 34 are more than 20 times more likely to die of gun homicide than their white counterparts.

Many people recognized that the lull in mass public shootings during 2020 brought on by the pandemic response would eventually end. The violence that we have seen in the past two weeks in the Atlanta area and Boulder points us to a different kind of gun debate — one that recognizes the cyclical nature of gun trauma while also recognizing that many gun policies are also counterproductive. Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.

We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.

In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.

he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”

the biggest victory of the NRA over the last generation isn’t so much making even the slightest and most modest gun control measures a political impossibility. The bigger win is the strategic victory of focusing the ‘debate’ on to such small-bore measures.

what we might call extreme gun ownership – individuals owning large numbers of often quasi-military firearms – is quite new. The mass casualty shooting is no longer a random freak out by a troubled person: it’s an established American idiom of violence, a way certain people choose to make a statement to the society at large.

78% of Americans own no guns.3% own fully 50% of the firearms in the country.

Each of them accidentally went to the wrong address or opened the wrong door — and each was shot. They had made innocent mistakes that became examples of the kind of deadly errors that can occur in a country bristling with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.

The maintenance man in North Carolina had just arrived to fix damage from a leak. The teenager in Georgia was only looking for his girlfriend’s apartment. The cheerleader in Texas simply wanted to find her car in a dark parking lot after practice.

many other cases have attracted far less attention. In July 2021, a Tennessee man was charged with brandishing a handgun and firing it after two cable-company workers mistakenly crossed onto his land. Last June, a Virginia man was arrested after the authorities say he shot at three lost teenage siblings who had accidentally pulled onto his property.

For decades, America’s gun violence researchers fought an uphill battle against the National Rifle Association to obtain the data and funding they need to study the effects of US gun laws.

California, which has much stricter gun laws than most American states, also has more detailed government data available, including records of individual handgun purchasers going back decades and statewide records about the restraining orders filed to temporarily bar at-risk people from owning or buying guns.

This more detailed personal information has allowed California researchers to conduct rigorous analyses of the state’s gun laws and policies, looking at early evidence of whether the state’s new gun violence restraining orders have helped to prevent mass shootings, studying whether buying a handgun puts a person at higher risk of dying from gun suicide, and examining whether expanding the category of people with violent records who are barred from buying guns might reduce gun violence.

It was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.

It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.6 This was the question of that autumn. And, in a way, it has been the question of every season since,

I once came across a book called The Constitution Made Easy.7 The Constitution cannot be made easy. It was never meant to be easy.