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Further implications
The gun debate within the United States has been waged for almost a hundred years, at least since the United States Supreme Court in 1939, in the case U.S. vs Miller, issued a restricted interpretation of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution which seemed to curtail the right of individual citizens to carry arms.
This in no way put an end to the issue as 44 of the United States 52 states have provisions in their state constitutions which seek to guarantee citizens the right to gun ownership. What has kept that right in contention is the persistently violent nature of American society and the extent of gun crime and gun-related injuries and deaths suffered in the United States. Gun-related deaths from preventable, intentional, and undetermined causes totaled 45,222 in 2020, an increase of 13.9 percent from 39,707 deaths in 2019. Suicides account for 54 percent of deaths related to firearms, while 43 percent were homicides, and about 1 percent were preventable or accidental.
This recent increase in gun-related deaths is in the context of a long-term overall reduction in violent and property crime across the United States. Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49 percent between 1993 and 2019, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-68 percent), murder/non-negligent manslaughter (-47 percent) and aggravated assault (-43 percent).
This suggests that the increase in gun-related crime and death is running against an overall trend showing a decline in violent crime. Mass shootings have emerged as a particular area of concern. As of May 24, there were three mass shootings in the United States in 2022. This is compared to one mass shooting in 1982 and one in 2000. The increase in mass shootings appears to have taken off in 2012 when there were seven mass shootings. One of these was at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 28 people were killed including the perpetrator. This is the worst mass shooting at a United States elementary school and the fourth deadliest mass shooting in United States history. There were a further seven mass shootings in 2015 and then eleven in 2017, twelve in 2018, and nine in 2019. 2020, the first year of COVID, saw a dramatic drop with two mass shootings, then up to six in 2021 and three already this year, with one, the Robb Elementary School shooting, being the second worst incident at an elementary school in United States history. In the ten years between 2012 and 2021 the United States has averaged 6.8 mass shootings a year.
The figures quoted here are from Statista (a German company specialising in market and consumer data.) Everytown, a lobby group that gathers data in a bid to reduce gun violence in the United States presents a worse picture. Though the trends it presents in mass shootings are the same, the numbers of mass shootings it gives are higher. Everytown sets the number of deaths for a mass shooting at four, Statista uses a higher figure. This is clearly a massive social, legal and law enforcement problem. Part of the difficulty of addressing it is that the issue is highly polarizing in the United States. Though some 53 percent of Americans think gun laws should be stricter, the 32 percent who think they are currently as they should be and the 14 percent who think they should be less strict hold to these views very strongly.
The issue is also a highly politicised one, with Democrats firmly favouring stricter gun laws and the Republicans at least as strongly opposing restrictions on gun ownership. At a federal level this means that any laws seeking to regulate access to guns, including measures as relatively tame as background checks on gun owners, will be blocked by the Republicans in the Senate even when the Democrats hold the other house. Therefore, the easiest jurisdictions in which to make any sort of reform are the states. Here, however, state governors also pass laws in accord with their party's views so that Republican states typically oppose reforms and Democrat states tend to implement them.
The issue seems unresolvable until there is a shift in popular attitudes to gun laws toward a deep and wide consensus. Though the issue is so inherently emotive, it may help the debate progress if it were possible to remove some of the emotion from it.