The U.S. is home to more guns than people. The toll of this abundance of firearms is staggering: Guns killed more than 48,000 people in the U.S. in 2022, the equivalent of one person every 11 minutes. More than half of those deaths were suicides, and guns are the overall leading cause of death in children aged one to 17. Mass shootings—600-some per year in recent years, although definitions vary—have stoked fear and anger, reshaping the American school experience. Yet mass shootings make up only a tiny fraction of firearm fatalities. And about a third of Americans say they own a gun, even as six in 10 say they favor stricter gun laws.
The rage, despair, carelessness and greed behind the deaths may be universal, but such numbers are unique to the U.S. Here “our interpersonal conflicts are much more likely to be lethal because we’re more likely to be armed with guns,” says Daniel Webster, a gun violence researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
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But there’s nothing inevitable about the prevalence of gun deaths in the U.S. It’s a reality that policies have created and that policies could change, if the political will existed. Evidence suggests that if Vice President Kamala Harris were to become the next U.S. president, she would move toward policies that would reduce gun violence—and that if former president Donald Trump were reelected, he would support laxer policies that could permit gun violence to worsen.
Compared with other common health issues in the U.S., data about gun violence are limited; data about nonfatal gun injuries are almost nonexistent. These gaps, combined with the usual scientific difficulties of distinguishing between causation and correlation, mean researchers lack…
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