The United States of America is an outlier in the international community when discussing gun violence in superpower nations. Our firearm homicide rates are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany. Two U.S. territories (the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico) have the top five highest firearm homicide rates out of all high-income nations. Why have we, the leaders of the free world, allowed this to happen?
As of 2017, PEW Research Center reports that three in 10 Americans own at least one gun, with four in 10 saying that there is a gun in their household. In the mid 1980s, five in 10 said the latter, so this is not necessarily an issue of gun accessibility in homes; in fact, since 1973, the percentage of American households having guns has decreased by 28%. So, what causes this large discrepancy between America in similar nations? Mass media and its platforming of violence play a part in this discussion, with numerous televised examples of gun violence being broadcast in America to severe backlash.
Robert Budd Dwyer was Pennsylvania’s Treasurer in the early to mid 1980s, and when faced with political pressure, shot himself during a press conference in 1987. In 1998, Daniel V. Jones was a California resident and AIDs patient who also killed himself on live TV, protesting the Health Maintenance Organization atop a Los Angeles freeway. In 1993, Maritza Martin was shot to death by her ex-husband, captured by the Spanish American TV program Telemundo. All these graphic instances of violence were aired on nationally broadcast television, all prior to the infamous Columbine school shooting, perhaps desensitizing Americans to the violence apparent in our communities.
In many instances, we as Americans try our best to separate the inseparable relationship between gun ownership and violence. Far-right political pundit Alex Jones, for example, famously declared that the families of Sandy Hook victims were paid actors and that the tragedy was a hoax. Rather than acknowledge the reality of gun violence in America, Jones spread lies which incited his conspiratorial audience to harass these families, and was subsequently forced to pay $1.3 billion in damages (of which has still not been paid out).
Another right leaning pundit, Charlie Kirk, said that some gun violence deaths are “worth it” for the Second Amendment to exist, a statement brought up frequently by his critics following his death by gun violence earlier this month. Many of his supporters combated the proliferation of this quote by mentioning its context, as Kirk compared gun violence deaths to automotive deaths as a ‘price’ for our driving of cars. Yet this only deepens the debate over gun violence and ownership: if monster trucks are banned from highways for their capabilities, shouldn’t assault rifles be banned for the same reason? And regardless, if some innocent deaths are worth our gun ownership, why must this be the case?
Since the town of Littleton, Co. faced the infamous Columbine massacre, there have been 131 mass shootings in school settings. Since the start of 2013, there have been 6,902 mass shootings in America. Despite the good people with guns, tragedy has still struck our nation time and time again. Clearly, this is not a new issue, a sudden one, nor an easily explainable and traceable one as may seem present in this article. A wealth of social factors has contributed to what we now consider our American landscape, one of random acts of violence and cycles of grief with no change, and without some form of legislation outlining and restricting gun access, there can be no hope for these enormous numbers to slow, let alone stop.
