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The Sebring, Fla., bank shooting is a developing story and details will be updated.

The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

Related

The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country's gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the public shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include domestic shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

Public mass shootings are a small slice of gun deaths

Source: Gun Violence Archive. Excludes the roughly 22,000 annual gun suicides, which are not publicly reported in real time.

This tally begins Aug. 1, 1966, when a student sniper fired down on passersby from the observation deck of a clock tower at the University of Texas. By the time police killed him, 17 other people were dead or dying. As Texas Monthly's Pamela Colloff wrote, the shooting "ushered in the notion that any group of people, anywhere - even walking around a university campus on a summer day - could be killed at random by a stranger."

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Analysis | More than 50 years of U.S. mass shootings: The victims, sites, killers and weapons

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The Sebring, Fla., bank shooting is a developing story and details will be updated. The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

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Center for Injury Research and Prevention

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According to the scientific literature, American children face a substantial risk of exposure to firearm injury and death. Following are additional relevant gun violence facts:

In 2016, 4,648 young people ages 10-24 were victims of homicide - an average of 13 each day.

Gun Violence Facts: In the Home

There are more than 393 million guns in circulation in the United States - approximately 120.5 guns for every 100 people.

1.7 million children live with unlocked, loaded guns - 1 out of 3 homes with kids have guns.

In 2015, 2,824 children (age 0 to 19 years) died by gunshot and an additional 13,723 were injured.

An emergency department visit for non-fatal assault injury places a youth at 40 percent higher risk for subsequent firearm injury.

Those people that die from accidental shooting were more than three times as likely to have had a firearm in their home as those in the control group.

Among children, the majority (89%) of unintentional shooting deaths occur in the home. Most of these deaths occur when children are playing with a loaded gun in their parent's absence.

People who report "firearm access" are at twice the risk of homicide and more than three times the risk of suicide compared to those who do not own or have access to firearms.

Suicide rates are much higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership, even after controlling for differences among states for poverty, urbanization, unemployment, mental illness, and alcohol or drug abuse.

Among suicide victims requiring hospital treatment, suicide attempts with a firearm are much more deadly than attempts by jumping or drug poisoning - 90 percent die compared to 34 percent and 2 percent respectively. About 90 percent of those that survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide.

States implementing universal background checks and mandatory waiting periods prior to the purchase of a firearm show lower rates of suicides than states without this legislation. To read more about suicide and firearms, click here.

In states with increased gun availability, death rates from gunshots for children were higher than in states with less availability.

The vast majority of accidental firearm deaths among children are related to child access to firearms - either self-inflicted or at the hands of another child.

Studies have shown that states with Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws laws have a lower rate of unintentional death than states without CAP laws.

Domestic violence is more likely to turn deadly with a gun in the home. An abusive partner's access to a firearm increases the risk of homicide eight-fold for women in physically abusive relationships. Read more about the impact of child exposure to domestic violence.

Safe Storage of Guns in the Home

The U.S. General Accounting Office estimated that 31 percent of accidental deaths caused by firearms might be prevented with the addition of two devices: a child-proof safety lock and a loading indicator.

Approximately one of three handguns guns is kept loaded and unlocked and most children know where their parents keep their guns.

More than 75 percent of first and second graders know where their parents keep their firearms and 36 percent admitted handling the weapons, contradicting their parents' reports.

More than 80 percent of guns used by youth in suicide attempts were kept in the home of the victim, a relative, or a friend.

Gun owners in a household (predominantly men) are more likely to report that their gun is stored unlocked and loaded, compared to the non-owners (predominantly women) in those households. This argues for better education of household members regarding safe storage in homes with children.

Gun Violence Facts: Assault-style Weapons

These weapons are responsible for a minority of gun deaths in the US, but have become the weapon of choice for the assailant whose intent is chaos and casualties.

In an April 2018 review of mass shootings in the U.S., 99 mass shootings have occurred since 1982, from which approximately 76 semi-automatic handguns and 89 assault weapons and weapons with high magazine capacity were recovered.

On May 18, 2018, a teen shooter used a shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver that he took from his father to kill 10 people and wound 10 others at Santa Fe High School in Texas; this marked the 1,686th mass shooting since Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.

In 2017 alone, 11 mass shootings in the US caused 117 fatalities and 587 injuries occurring in concert, religious, workplace, airport, and shopping venues and in the community.

At Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, Adam Lanza reportedly fired more than 150 shots in less than five minutes from his assault-style rifle with a high capacity magazine.

On June 12, 2016 at Pulse Nightclub, a single shooter killed 49 people and injured 53. It was the worst mass shooting in US history until the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017 took 58 lives and left 546 injured.

In February 2018, a school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL left 17 people dead and 14 wounded. The teen shooter used an AR-15 semi-automatic style weapon, the same weapon used during the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

States that restrict assault weapons also have the lowest per capita homicide rates. However, because guns are easily trafficked in interstate and international commerce, federal rules are needed.

Researchers from Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. From late 2011 to 214, they found mass shootings had occurred at triple that rate-every 64 days on average.

Gun Injury Prevention Research

Federal legislation passed in 1997 stated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." The vague nature of this law, and its 2011 extension to the National Institutes of Health, has effectively prevented federal funding for firearms-related research.

In 2013, following the Sandy Hook shooting, former President Barack Obama issued an executive order calling for the CDC to "conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it". Despite this and without specific appropriations from U.S. Congress, new research proposals remain unfunded.

After the federal legislation preventing firearm research, there were 25 percent fewer publications on firearms compared to what would have been expected relative to other causes of death in children.

In March 2018, a new spending bill clarified that the CDC can conduct research into gun violence but did not allocate specific funding toward this effort.

Pennsylvania-specific Gun Violence Facts

According to the CDC, there were 1,555 firearm fatalities in Pennsylvania in 2016.

In 2014 there were 1,217 firearm related injuries in Pennsylvania; almost half of these were in persons under 25 years old. Almost half (532) of all firearm related injuries in Pennsylvania occurred in Philadelphia County. The firearm mortality rate for Pennsylvania is 12 per 100,000 people, slightly higher than the national average and higher than any of our neighboring states.

In Pennsylvania, suicide and homicide accounts for over 96 percent of all firearm-related deaths according to data collected from 2010-2014.

Self-injury of Pennsylvanians by firearm is fatal 91 percent of the time, compared to hanging and poisonings which are fatal 79 percent and 3 percent of the time, respectively.

Updated May 2018: There are numerous sources for the facts and statistics listed above including databases from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pennsylvania Department of Health, and Mother Jones; research reports from Congressional Research Service, US General Accounting Office, Brady Campaign, and Every Town for Gun Safety; news articles from Mother Jones, Washington Post, New York Times; and many peer-reviewed journal articles. This page was reviewed by physician-scientists from the Violence Prevention Initiative. If you would like to request a specific citation, please use the website's Contact Us form.

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According to the scientific literature, American children face a substantial risk of exposure to firearm injury and death. Following are additional relevant gun violence facts: In 2016, 4,648 young people ages 10-24 were victims of homicide - an average of 13 each day.

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Posted on

Gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis.

It goes beyond the mass shootings that grab the nation's attention. Every day, gun violence takes lives from communities all across the country in the form of suicides, unintentional shootings, and interpersonal conflicts that become fatal due to easy access to guns.

In this country, an average of 35,000 people are killed with guns every year-96 each day.

Yet this violence is not inevitable. Every other developed nation in the world does a better job of protecting its people from gun violence. The gun murder rate in the United States is 25 times higher than it is in peer nations, and American teenagers are 82 times more likely to die from a gun homicide than their international peers.

There is no single, simple solution to reducing gun violence in this country. However, there are a number of common-sense steps that would be a great place to start-steps that could be taken right now.

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6 Ways to Reduce Gun Violence in America - Center for American Progress

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Posted on Gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis. It goes beyond the mass shootings that grab the nation's attention. Every day, gun violence takes lives from communities all across the country in the form of suicides, unintentional shootings, and interpersonal conflicts that become fatal due to easy access to guns.

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A year ago today, on February 14, 2018, a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 people, and wounded 17 others. The shooting inspired a wave of activism, leading to the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, and new activism for gun control around the 2018 midterm elections.

But since the Parkland shooting, Congress has taken no significant steps to address gun violence. And since Parkland, there have been nearly 350 mass shootings - nearly one every day - based on the Gun Violence Archive 's definition, which counts every event in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, were shot but not necessarily killed at the same general time and location.

We know what to do to stop this. But we aren't doing it.

Since I began covering mass shootings at Vox, I've seen the same pattern play out again and again: A shooting happens. There are demands for action. Maybe something gets introduced in Congress. The debate goes back and forth for a bit. Then people move on - usually after a week or two (although Parkland was an exception). Then, eventually, there's another mass shooting, and the cycle begins anew.

I have become eerily attuned to this horrible American ritual. I even have my own version of it: Every time we get news of a mass shooting, I verify the reports, contribute to a "what we know" article, and then begin to update our old pieces on guns. Because nothing changes, everything we wrote in the past still applies; all we have to change is the date, location, and number of dead.

I do this almost instinctively at this point - and that terrifies me. No one should get used to this.

As I see it, the core issue is that America collectively refuses to even admit it has a serious problem with guns and gun violence. Lawmakers continue acting like the solutions are some sort of mystery, as if there aren't years of research and experiences in other countries that show restrictions on firearms can save lives.

Consider President Donald Trump's initial speech in response to the Parkland shooting: His only mention of guns was a vague reference to "gunfire" as he described what happened. He never even brought up gun control or anything related to that debate, instead vaguely promising to work "with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health."

This is America's elected leader - and he essentially, based on his first public response, ignored what the real problem is. And although the White House eventually came around to bipartisan proposals to very slightly improve background checks and ban bump stocks, the compromises amount to fairly small changes to America's weak gun laws.

In my coverage of these shootings, I've always focused on solutions through studies and policy ideas that would tamp down on the number of shootings. The good news is there are real solutions out there.

But America can't get to those solutions until it admits it has a gun problem and confronts the reality of what it would mean to seriously address it.

1) America has a unique gun violence problem

The US is unique in two key - and related - ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far higher levels of gun ownership than any other country in the world.

The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

Mass shootings actually make up a small fraction of America's gun deaths, constituting less than 2 percent of such deaths in 2016. But America does see a lot of these horrific events: According to CNN, "The US makes up less than 5% of the world's population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters."

The US also has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.

Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.

These two facts - on gun deaths and firearm ownership - are related. The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center, is pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides, but also with suicides (which in recent years were around 60 percent of US gun deaths), domestic violence, and even violence against police.

For example, a 2013 study, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, found that, after controlling for multiple variables, each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.

This chart, based on data from GunPolicy.org, shows the correlation between the number of guns and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) among wealthier nations:

Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.

2) The problem is guns, not mental illness

Supporters of gun rights look at America's high levels of gun violence and argue that guns are not the problem. They point to other issues, from violence in video games and movies to the supposed breakdown of the traditional family.

Most recently, they've blamed mental health issues for mass shootings. This is the only policy issue that Trump mentioned in his first speech following the Florida shooting.

But as far as homicides go, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had mental illnesses. "The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the 'chief' perpetrators of mass murder," he concluded. Other research has backed this up.

More broadly, America does not have a monopoly on mental illness. That's not to say more access to mental health care wouldn't help; it could, for example, be effective for reducing the number of gun suicides. But mental health issues aren't what make the US stand out in terms of gun violence.

The problem that's unique to the US, instead, is guns - and America's abundance of them.

As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it's not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:

Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence - and that's driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," Zimring and Hawkins wrote. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."

This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it's much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.

3) The research shows that gun control works

The research also suggests that gun control can work. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence - a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save lives.

Consider Australia's example.

In 1996, a 28-year-old man armed with a semiautomatic rifle went on a rampage in Port Arthur, Australia, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.

Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a mandatory buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)

Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to a review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.

It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program and other legal changes. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."

One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant because Australia already had a pretty low number of murders. But the drop in suicides most definitely was - and the results are striking.

One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."

4) State and local actions are not enough

A common counterpoint to the evidence on gun control: If it works so well, why does Chicago have so much gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun policies in the US?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made this argument after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting: "I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn't helped there."

It's true that Chicago has fairly strict gun laws (although not the strictest). And it's true that the city has fairly high levels of gun violence (although also not the worst in the US).

This doesn't, however, expose the failure of gun control altogether, but rather the limits of leaving gun policies to a patchwork of local and state laws. The basic problem: If a city or state passes strict gun control measures, people can simply cross a border to buy guns in a jurisdiction with laxer laws.

Chicago, for example, requires a Firearm Owners Identification card, a background check, a three-day waiting period, and documentation for all firearm sales. But Indiana, across the border, doesn't require any of this for purchases between two private individuals (including those at gun shows and those who meet through the internet), allowing even someone with a criminal record to buy a firearm without passing a background check or submitting paperwork recording the sale.

So someone from Chicago can drive across the border - to Indiana or to other places with lax gun laws - and buy a gun without any of the big legal hurdles he would face at home. Then that person can resell or give guns to others in Chicago, or keep them, leaving no paper trail behind. (This is illegal trafficking under federal law, but Indiana's lax laws and enforcement - particularly the lack of a paper trail - make it virtually impossible to catch someone until a gun is used in a crime.)

The result: According to a 2014 report from the Chicago Police Department, nearly 60 percent of the guns in crime scenes that were recovered and traced between 2009 and 2013 came from outside the state. About 19 percent came from Indiana - making it the most common state of origin for guns besides Illinois.

This isn't exclusive to Chicago. A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: "the Iron Pipeline.") And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns - as many as 70 percent - used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.

That doesn't mean the stricter gun laws in Chicago, New York, or any other jurisdiction have no effect, but it does limit how far these local and state measures can go, since the root of the problem lies in other places' laws. The only way the pipeline could be stopped would be if all states individually strengthened their gun laws at once - or, more realistically, if the federal government passed a law that enforces stricter rules across the US.

5) America probably needs to go further than anyone wants to admit

America's attention to gun control often focuses on a few specific measures: universal background checks, restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying firearms, and an assault weapons ban, for example. It is rare that American politicians, even on the left, go much further than that. Something like Australia's law - which amounts to a confiscation program - is never seriously considered.

As Matthews previously explained, this is a big issue. The US's gun problem is so dire that it arguably needs solutions that go way further than what we typically see in mainstream proposals - at least, if the US ever hopes to get down to European levels of gun violence.

If the fundamental problem is that America has far too many guns, then policies need to cut the number of guns in circulation right now to seriously reduce the number of gun deaths. Background checks and other restrictions on who can buy a gun can't achieve that in the short term. What America likely needs, then, is something more like Australia's mandatory buyback program - essentially, a gun confiscation scheme - paired with a serious ban on specific firearms (including, potentially, all semiautomatic weapons).

But no one in Congress is seriously proposing something that sweeping. The Manchin-Toomey bill, the only gun legislation in Congress after Sandy Hook that came close to becoming law, didn't even establish universal background checks. Recent proposals have been even milder, taking small steps like banning bump stocks or slightly improving the existing system for background checks.

Part of the holdup is the Second Amendment. While there is reasonable scholarly debate about whether the Second Amendment actually protects all Americans' individual right to bear arms and prohibits stricter forms of gun control, the reality is the Supreme Court and US lawmakers - backed by the powerful gun lobby, particularly the NRA - widely agree that the Second Amendment does put barriers on how far restrictions can go. That would likely rule out anything like the Australian policy response short of a court reinterpretation or a repeal of the Second Amendment, neither of which seems likely.

So the US, for political, cultural, and legal reasons, seems to be unable to take the action that it really needs.

None of that is to say that milder measures are useless. Connecticut's law requiring handgun purchasers to first pass a background check and obtain a license, for example, was followed by a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and a 15 percent reduction in handgun suicides. Similar results - in the reverse - were reported in Missouri when it repealed its own permit-to-purchase law. It's difficult to separate these changes from long-term trends (especially since gun homicides have generally been on the decline for decades now), but a review of the evidence by RAND linked milder gun control measures, including background checks, to reduced injuries and deaths - and that means these measures likely saved lives.

There are also some evidence-based policies that could help outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs.

But if America wants to get to the levels of gun deaths that its European peers report, it will likely need to go much, much further on guns in particular.

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I've covered gun violence for years. The solutions aren't a big mystery.

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America can prevent shootings. But it has to come to grips with the problem.

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WASHINGTON - Politicians from the president down are talking about new legislation and executive action after a gunman murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The mass shooting has prompted the most intense sustained debate over gun laws since another school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut killed 26 people, 20 of them children, in 2012.

Here's a look at some of the biggest ideas that President Donald Trump and lawmakers have put forward, what they would do, and their chances of being put in place.

There are several major bipartisan bills drawing renewed attention in the Senate this month that aim to expand background checks for gun sale.

The first is the Fix NICS Act, which was introduced last year by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. The White House has signaled its interest in the bill and the NRA is not opposed, removing two big obstacles to passage; Senate leaders are planning to move ahead with a vote.

Like a lot of proposals being discussed, it was crafted as a response to a prior shooting. It aims to correct failures in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that allowed the shooter who killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017 to legally buy a gun despite a domestic violence conviction in the Air Force that should have come up in a background check if it had been properly updated. The bill also would provide more funding to states to improve their background check system and penalize political appointees at federal agencies if they don't take steps to maintain their records.

But gun safety groups are much more interested in a second bill that would make more fundamental changes.

Manchin-Toomey, introduced in 2013 after the Sandy Hook attack, would have required background checks on online and gun show sales of firearms, closing what critics call the "gun show loophole," while exempting private sales between friends and family. One study by researchers at Northeastern University and Harvard University estimated that 22 percent of gun sales occur without a background check under the current system. Facing opposition from the NRA, the bill secured 54 votes in 2013, but fell short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Both Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Penn., have talked about reviving it since the Parkland shooting.

The Fix NICS Act is much more likely to pass in the short term, but could become tripped up by politics as well. The House passed its own version of the bill in December, but it contained a major pro-gun provision that ensures it has no chance in the Senate: Forcing states with stricter gun laws to recognize concealed carry permits from other states.

Democrats also could be wary of passing a background check bill that falls short of Manchin-Toomey. "If we only pass Fix NICS, we'll be right back here after the next shooting in nearly the same place," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a floor speech on Monday.

Another bipartisan proposal that's gained some renewed attention: The "No Fly, No Buy" bill by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, which would restrict firearm sales to people on a terror watch list while giving them the ability to appeal. The Senate and House have previously rejected both the Collins bill and related legislation amid concerns from gun rights groups and civil liberties groups like the ACLU, who complained that it would violate due process by using broad watch lists in ways they were not intended.

Trump and Florida Gov. Rick Scott have both called for raising the minimum age to buy rifles like those used in the Parkland attack from 18 to 21 years old, where it currently stands for handgun purchases through licensed dealers. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.. is working on legislation with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that could restrict AR-15 sales for nonmilitary buyers under 21.

Gun rights groups are generally against the idea, however, with the NRA's top lobbyist calling it "gratuitous gun control," and some key senators have also expressed skepticism, making a federal law an uphill climb.

After a series of high-profile mass shootings, President Bill Clinton signed the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which restricted features on semi-automatic pistols, rifles and shotguns. It expired in 2004 and the odds of it being passed again in Congress are remote, but the use of an AR-15 rifle or similar model in Parkland and Sandy Hook and other major attacks, have continued to prompt calls for new restrictions.

Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., who lost both legs as an Army soldier in Afghanistan, came out for a new assault weapons ban last week, saying civilian versions of military rifles like the AR-15 gave mass shooters "the best killing tool the Army could put in my hands." The rifles fire at a higher velocity than handguns, which doctors who have treated mass shooting victims say produces much deadlier wounds.

Gun-rights supporters say the bills would unnecessarily restrict popular firearms and that the original assault weapon ban required only minor tweaks for gun manufacturers to produce broadly similar weapons.

Experts say there is one element of an assault weapons ban that could make a concrete difference in mass shootings: Restricting large-capacity magazines, which the original bill limited to ten rounds. The shooter who killed 12 people and shot 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012 used a 100-round drum magazine, for example, which prompted Colorado legislators to ban magazines that carry over 15 bullets. Louis J. Klarevas, who researched five decades of mass shootings for his book Rampage Nation, concluded that "the factor most associated with high death tolls in gun massacres is the use of a magazine holding more than ten bullets."

The White House and Congress are looking at measures to restrict the sale of bump stocks, an attachment to semi-automatic weapons that can increase the rate of fire to more closely resemble an automatic weapon.

This is yet another proposal that gained bipartisan momentum after a previous mass shooting only to quietly fade into the background. In this case it was the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, in which the killer fired hundreds of rounds into crowds at a country music festival and used guns outfitted with bump stock modifications.

Lawmakers in both parties expressed interest in banning bump stocks in the aftermath, complaining they violated the spirit of existing bans on automatic weapons. The NRA came out for letting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulate bump stocks rather than passing a new law, however, and momentum faded. The agency had previously concluded it did not have authority to address the issue in 2010.

Trump has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to develop regulations to ban them and it's possible that legislation will gain momentum if the regulatory ban fails to make headway. In the meantime, some state and local governments have advanced their own bump stock bans.

One proposed approach is to give courts more authority to confiscate weapons from people who are considered a threat to themselves and others. Five states have "red flag" laws that allow a judge to issue an extreme risk protection order that temporarily restricts a person from owning a gun if family, household members and police can convince them they're a danger. Gun safety groups say they hold the potential to reduce suicide rates and contain potential violence early on.

This proposal has gained special attention after the Parkland attack, where authorities identified prior complaints about the suspected shooter warning he was a possible threat. With a red flag law, they could take the evidence to a judge and seek immediate action rather than go through the more difficult process of committing someone or prosecuting them for a crime.

Both Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and the White House have expressed interest in red flag laws since the shooting, among others, though it's more likely they would be pursued at the state level in the short term. "It seems to be working in certain areas," White House spokesman Raj Shah said at a briefing last week. Some pro-gun conservatives have argued they're a promising alternative to new gun laws, since they target individual behavior rather than restrict firearms themselves.

But they could face resistance: The NRA opposed a red flag law in Oregon last year, warning it would "deprive someone of their Second Amendment rights without due process of the law." Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, a Democrat, told reporters on Monday that the law helps them confront people at "extreme risk of harming themselves or others."

Trump's most unique contribution to the gun debate is his proposal to encourage teachers with proper training to carry a weapon in order to deter or foil potential mass shooters. As an incentive, he suggested offering bonus pay for armed educators. The National Education Association is strongly opposed to the idea and public policy experts have raised numerous concerns.

So far there's no specific legislation or executive plan to implement it at the federal level and it's attracted some Republican criticism as well. "That is really a question for local governments, local school boards," Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., told reporters on Tuesday.

While no states have issued blanket permission to teachers carry concealed weapons, according to a report by the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, a handful do allow schools to authorize staff to carry guns in certain circumstances. In Florida, Republican State Sen. Dennis Baxley has proposed legislation that would allow school principals to designate certain staff or volunteers to carry a firearm, but legislative leaders and the governor oppose arming teachers.

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6 proposals to reduce gun violence and how they work

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WASHINGTON - Politicians from the president down are talking about new legislation and executive action after a gunman murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The mass shooting has prompted the most intense sustained debate over gun laws since another school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut killed 26 people, 20 of them children, in 2012.

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Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S. Guns kill more than 38,000 people and cause nearly 85,000 injuries each year. As a longtime advocate for violence prevention policies, APHA recognizes a comprehensive public health approach to addressing this growing crisis is necessary.

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In light of the "March For Our Lives" happening in Washington D.C. today (as well in venues across the nation and the globe), I want to address the logic of the argument I have seen most often in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High shooting-an argument against imposing stricter gun regulations, such as universal background checks and banning assault rifles. The argument goes like this:

"We don't have a gun problem, we have a people problem."

It's related to the NRA's argument that "guns don't kill people; people kill people" (which I have addressed elsewhere), but it actually goes a little deeper.
Understanding the argument
The suggestion is essentially that the real cause of why we have more gun violence in America (compared to other developed nations) is because of the moral degradation of our society; people in America are more immoral and more prone to violence, and this is why we have more gun related violence-not the prevalence of guns. So, to address the problem, we need moral education, not gun regulations.

The cited cause of this moral degradation shifts, depending on who you ask. For some, it's faulty parenting. For others, it's the fact that "God has been taken out of society (and schools)." For still others, it's the violent and amoral entertainment that we consume. Correspondingly, the preferred solution also varies: better parenting, outlawing or rating entertainment, "putting God back in society and schools." But definitely not gun regulations; they won't solve anything.
How to tell whether amorality is to blame
Although the argument, on its face, might seem convincing, it shouldn't be. Indeed, it is deeply flawed.

First, it provides no solid evidence that American society is actually in moral decline. Some cite their own personal experience, others the impression they get from watching the news-but, of course, this evidence is no good. You can't generalize from your own personal experience to society as a whole-that's the fallacy of hasty generalization. And the news is likely to leave you with a false impression, due to availability error and confirmation bias. It reports the bad but leaves out the good.

Second, the main claim of this argument is this: the moral degradation of our society is what causes us to have more gun violence. But, at least in principle, this claim is empirically testable: To test causal claims, we simply look for correlations. If A causes B, then A should be correlated with B. Correlation, of course, doesn't establish causation-that's the causal fallacy. But it is necessary for it.

So, in principle, if the moral degradation of American society is the problem, we should be able to find a correlation between how amoral other societies are and how bad their gun violence problem is. Of course, it's difficult to measure the morality of a nation. But we can look to the argument for clues. Since bad parenting, a lack of religion, and corrupting media is supposedly the cause, we can look at counties with bad parents, little religion, and corrupting media to see if gun violence is as high there as it is here.
Is it bad parenting?
Although it's difficult to judge parenting, you can look at how "easy" it is to be a parent-literally how much time a nation's parents have to spend with their kids (for things like moral instruction). And, it turns out, the U.S. is dead last, followed by Mexico and Costa Rica-both of which, like the U.S., have high rates of gun violence. (10.45 per 100,000 for the U.S. 11.23 for Mexico, and 6.3 for Costa Rica.) [ source] So you might think bad parenting actually is to blame.

But high levels of gun violence in Mexico and Costa Rica stem from drug trafficking, not bad parenting. And the next nation on the "bad parents" list is Canada, which, at .5, has a much lower gun crime rate than all three. (Ironically, 0.5 is still higher than most developed nations). New Zealand and Switzerland round out the bottom 10, but also have low gun crime rates (1.07 and 3.01 respectively). [ source] So, clearly, the problem clearly isn't bad parenting.
Is atheism to blame?
To see whether a lack of religion in America is to blame for gun violence, we can look to the rate of gun violence in the most non-religious nations in the world. If the argument is right, gun violence in non-religious nations should be off the chart.

But this is not the case. China is the most irreligious, but it also has one of the lowest reported gun violence rates in the world. Indeed, since 2012, crime in China is down 80%. Of course, given the Chinese government's reputation, those reports might not be accurate. But roughly the same is true of the next most religious countries:

% of non-religious Total gun deaths per 100,000

Sweden 73% 1.47

Czech Republic 72% 2.01

United Kingdom 69% 0.23

Azerbaijan 64% 0.07

Belgium 64% 1.24

Australia 63% 1.04

Hong Kong 63% 0.03

The trend continues. Indeed, if we compare these counties with the U.S., and embrace the logic of the argument we are considering...

United States 39% 10.45

...it would seem that irreligion is the solution to gun violence, not the cause.
Is the media to blame?
If the violent American media diet is to blame for our outlandish rate of gun violence, then we should find that counties with similar media diets have equally high gun violence rates. But, of course, the media diets among developed nations across the world are essentially the same, and yet there is a vast difference when it comes to their gun violence rates-America's is high, the rest are exceptionally low.

This is especially true of the media that supposedly has the most corrupting influence: violent video games. I'll let my source for this one do all the heavy lifting for me on this one, but as you can see from this chart, per capita, the U.S. is #8th in video games spending, and yet is #1-by leaps and bounds-when it comes to gun violence. Indeed, the highest markets for video games-the Netherlands and South Korea--have the lowest gun related crime in the group.

Clearly, our media diet is not the problem either.
But what about the dropping crime rate?
To be fair, in researching this article I thought up a much better way to defend the primary assumption behind the argument we are considering-and that's to point out that (contrary to the suggestion of the argument and what most people believe), violent crime is actually decreasing in the U.S. And with it, so is gun related crime. Both have been on a steady decrease in the U.S. since the 90s.

Given this, you might think one could make a link between how violent people are, and how likely they are to commit a crime with a gun-and thus suggest that to get our gun crime rate down, we simply need to continue to try do make people less violent.

But sadly, this link cannot be made.

Why not? Because other countries, like France, Poland, Denmark, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, The United Kingdom, and Australia all have higher rates of violent crime, and yet all have lower rates of gun violence. [see point 7 here.] Indeed, the U.S.'s rate of violent crime is actually below average for developed nations, and yet (as we've seen), our rate of gun related crime is through the roof.

The same is true, by the way, about mental illness. It's no higher in the U.S. than in other countries, so it can't be the cause of our gun violence problem. The same can be said of abortion, which is actually higher in places with less gun violence than the U.S. (For example, the U.S. abortion rate is 19/1000, while Asian countries like Japan have an abortion rate of 28/1000 and Eastern European counties like Romania have an abortion rate of 43/1000--and yet the latter's gun violence rate is much lower than the U.S.) And while being a bully makes one statistically more likely to carry or use a weapon at school, there is no correlation between nations with a bullying problem and nations with gun violence problems. (Austria, for example, has a bullying problem similar to ours-- around 20% --but has a much lower gun homicide and school shooting rate. Interestingly, even though Austria has lax gun laws (when compared to its European counterparts), it has a much lower rate of gun ownership than them.)

The only things that set us apart in this regard, among developed nations, are our lax gun laws and our rate of gun ownership. Gun violence is higher in the U.S., not because we are more amoral than other nations (we're not), but because it's easier to access guns-both legally (because of lax gun regulations) and illegally (because they are so common).
A Simple Solution
The solution is simple: gun regulations that would make it more difficult for would-be violent criminals to access guns legally and would make it harder for them to access guns illegally-especially the kind of guns that enable one to inflict maximum damage in a minimum time.

As David DeGrazia points out, doing this wouldn't be difficult. Indeed, the evidence suggests that this can be done quite easily with very common-sense regulations:

Universal background checks

Banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazine clips

Requiring gun licensing for all new gun owners (after passing a safety course).

Safe storage requirements and required safety features (e.g., childproof locks) on all guns.

Effective tracing mechanisms on all guns and a national database of all gun owners (and holding owners responsible if their gun is used in a crime).

Of course, opponents of gun regulations will argue that such steps won't "stop" gun violence-but this argument commits yet another fallacy (called the " all or nothing" fallacy). Such efforts won't stop gun violence completely, sure...nothing can. But stopping crime altogether has never been the goal of any law. Laws are for reducing crime, not completely eliminating it. [See Endnote] And the evidence shows the kinds of regulations suggested above would do just that when it comes to gun violence.

Moral education couldn't completely eliminate violent people from society either; indeed, it would likely have very little effect. Now, I don't mean suggest that all such efforts are worthless. Indeed, Slate writer Laura Hayes has argued that, because violent crime is so often caused by people with anger management problems, education about anger management could reduce violent crime. If the experts agree, great; I say give it a shot.

But, in reality, the causes of violent crime are complex; and it's almost never as simple as "that person is just violent." Indeed, pathologically violent people are rare. It's often people's circumstances-like being poor -that drive them to violent criminal behavior.

When people become desperate enough, criminal behavior can actually become the rational option-even their only option for survival. And when it is, people turn to it. Think of Breaking Bad. Chemistry teacher Walter White would have never started making meth, and become a violent crime lord, had his medical bills not put him in such desperate financial straights. In the same way, someone who lives in a poor violent neighborhood may have no choice but to arm himself to survive, even though he isn't a violent person.

It's no coincidence that the 5 nations with the lowest violent crime rates all have low poverty rates, and the top 5 nations with the lowest poverty rates all have low violent crime rates. Indeed, Iceland and Norway are on both lists. In reality, the most effective means of reducing violent criminal behavior, and even gun violence, probably wouldn't even be gun regulation...it would be to establish a social safety net and guarantee a universal basic income. [ source]

But, in the meantime, gun regulation seems to be our best option. After all, there will always be violent people, they will still want to do violent things, and mass shootings are most often committed by angry or radicalized Christian middle-class white men. Such people will always be with us.

What we can do, however, is make it much harder for such people to amplify the affect of their anger by attaining the weapons they need to inflict maximum damage in a minimum amount of time. In other words, instead of trying to shift the focus to "moral education," let's do something that works. Let's force the truly angry, sick, and violent among us to have to try hard to kill people if they want--instead of making it easy for them by giving them easy (legal and illegal) access to AR-15s.

Copyright 2018, David Kyle Johnson

End Note: In a recent online conversation, a gun advocate insisted that laws weren't for reducing crime, but simply for punishing criminals-because society has decided that certain actions deserve to be punished. This, of course, is nonsense; laws prescribe punishment for criminals for the purpose of deterring (and thus reducing) criminal behavior; they are not merely punishing for punishment's sake. This demonstrates how far gun advocates will go to argue against gun regulations. Incapable of refuting the idea that gun regulations would reduce gun violence, this person opted instead to change the purpose of the entire legal system. They refused to recognize that the purpose of laws is the reduction of crime.

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When it comes to gun violence, is the problem people instead of guns?

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Essay about Gun Control Problems and Solutions - 968 Words | Bartleby

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Free Essay: The problem with guns is fairly obvious: they decrease the difficulty of killing or injuring a person. In Jeffrey A. Roth's Firearms and Violence...

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ANSWER
350 million is a lot of guns. And the gun-crime rate is going down. That seems like evidence that more guns make the nation safer. So we should just keep boosting gun-ownership rates.
QUESTION

Do more guns make people more safe? That's the argument put forward by the conservative economist John Lott. (In fact, it's even the title of his book: More Guns, Less Crime.) You've heard it expressed "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," though the deterrent effect is also a central element. But Lott's research has been criticized as faulty by many other analysts, and newer studies tend to find that the best way to lower gun crime is simply to reduce the number of guns available. A National Journal analysis in 2015 found that the stricter the gun laws were in a given state, the lower the number of gun-related deaths per capita.

ANSWER
Fine. Let's just ban guns altogether-and confiscate them if need be.
QUESTION

Does confiscation drive down gun crime, and could it work in the U.S.? Several countries have tried that, and they have generally been successful. The United Kingdom aggressively reduced guns following the Dunblane massacre and Australia after the Port Arthur massacre, both in 1996. Japan has had strict laws for much longer.

Effectively banning guns does, unsurprisingly, lead to huge reductions in gun violence. It's true that if you make guns criminal, only criminals will have guns, but that doesn't mean crime won't drop. But such models are widely seen as non-starters in the United States.

There are cultural, constitutional, and political hurdles. Americans-or more accurately, some Americans-are deeply fond of firearms, which is why there are more guns in the U.S. than people, even though only a third of American households own guns. The courts have in recent years tended to recognize the Second Amendment as a guarantee of the individual right to own a gun, which isn't always the way judges have viewed it in the past. And finally, there's the politics of it: Given that, once again, more modest steps are stalled out on Capitol Hill, confiscation is dead on arrival.

Perhaps something could change these politics, but as many people have pointed out, it's hard to imagine what that factor could be, given that even the Sandy Hook massacre didn't lead to significant changes in the law.

***

Does this mean that nothing can be done to stop gun violence? Of course not. Perhaps the problem is in thinking about gun policy in a vacuum. A better approach might be to start considering a range of potential strategies, especially the integration of tools that focus on root causes rather than on violence itself.

How much difference can be made simply with smarter policing strategies like increased patrols, targeting of hotspots, and more intensive probation?

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What's the Solution to Gun Violence in America?

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350 million is a lot of guns. And the gun-crime rate is going down. That seems like evidence that more guns make the nation safer. So we should just keep boosting gun-ownership rates. Do more guns make people more safe? That's the argument put forward by the conservative economist John Lott.

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Every Day on Average (ages 0-19)

Every day, 47 children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention.

Every day, 8 children and teens die from gun violence:

4 are murdered

3 die from suicide

1 killed unintentionally

Every day, 39 children and teens are shot and survive:

31 injured in an attack

1 survives a suicide attempt

7 shot unintentionally

Asking this simple question is an important step every parent can take to help keep their child safe, and possibly save their child's life. Read more about Asking Saves Kids (ASK). Note: Numbers may not sum because of rounding of CDC averages.
Every Day on Average (all ages)

Every day, 342 people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention.

Every day, 96 people die from gun violence:

34 are murdered

59 die from suicide

1 killed unintentionally

1 killed by legal intervention

1 died but was intent unknown

Every day, 246 people are shot and survive:

183 injured in an attack

11 survive a suicide attempt

49 shot unintentionally

4 are shot in a legal intervention

It's time for Congress to finish the job and expand Brady background checks to stop criminals and other dangerous people from getting guns in America. Learn more and sign the Finish the Job petition.

In One Year on Average (ages 0-19)

17,207 American children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention.

2,737 kids die from gun violence:

1,606 murdered

958 die from suicide

110 killed unintentionally

26 killed by legal intervention

36 die but intent was unknown

14,470 kids survive gun injuries:

11,386 injured in an attack

278 survive a suicide attempt

2,732 shot unintentionally

74 shot in a legal intervention

In America, 1 out of 3 homes with kids have guns and nearly 4.6 million children live in a home with loaded and unsecured guns. Talking to children about the dangers of firearms is not enough. Take Action with Asking Saves Kids Campaign now (ASK).
In One Year on Average (all ages)

124,760 people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention.>

35,141 people die from gun violence

12,246 murdered

21,637 die from suicide

500 killed unintentionally

479 killed by legal intervention

279 die but intent was unknown

497 women killed by husband or male dating partner**

89,620 people survive gun injuries:

66,673 injured in an attack

3,926 survive a suicide attempt

17,737 shot unintentionally

1,284 people are shot by legal intervention

Millions of guns are sold every year in "no questions asked" transactions. Experts estimate that 1 in 5 guns now sold in America are done so without a Brady background check. Take action with our Finish the Job campaign now. * The Brady Center averaged the most recent five years of complete data from death certificates (2011-2015) and estimates of emergency room admissions (2010-2014) available via CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control's Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/. Data retrieved 1.3.17 and 4.29.16 respectively. Numbers may not sum to 100% because of rounding of CDC averages. ** This number is a 5-year average derived from Violence Policy Center's "When Men Murder Women" analysis of FBI Homicide data, 2011-2015

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Every Day on Average (ages 0-19)Every day, 47 children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention.Every day, 8 children and teens die from gun violence:4 are murdered3 die from suicide1 killed unintentionallyEvery day, 39 children and teens are shot and survive: