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Newsela | Understanding key terms in the gun control debate

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Gun regulations can vary from state to state

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AP

There are more than 38,000 gun deaths in the US every year, and approximately 85,000 non-fatal injuries.

Despite some restrictions on gun research, scientists have sought to evaluate how certain policies affect gun deaths.

Policies that seem to reduce rates of gun violence include stricter background checks, limiting access to dangerous weapons, and prohibiting domestic abusers from owning weapons.

On Sunday, a gunman opened fire at a Madden NFL video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida. The shooter killed at least two victims and himself, and shot at least nine others.

As the country tries to figure out what - if anything - can be done in the wake of yet another mass shooting, it's worth taking a look at the evidence we have on the effects of gun regulations.

There are close to as many guns in the US as there are people. There may be more, or there may be fewer, depending on which study you look at - there's no exact count, since there isn't a national database of gun purchases or firearm owners, and federal law does not require a prospective gun owner to get a license or permit.

That's one of the many obstacles researchers come up against when trying to evaluate why so many people die from guns in the US.

But what they do know is that the number of gun deaths in the US is incredibly high. Most of these deaths are not from mass shootings, but from firearm suicides and murders. According to the American Public Health Association, guns kill more than 38,000 people per year and cause approximately 85,000 non-fatal injuries.

There's still a lot we don't know about this recent recent shooting, including whether the shooter purchased his weapon legally or if any common policy recommendations would have stopped him from obtaining a weapon.

Yet we do have evidence on effective policies that could have helped prevent some incidents. Despite some congressional limitations on gun research, scientists have sought to evaluate the effects of gun-control legislation in the US and in other places around the world.

Here's what the data shows.

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Features Gun Control Parkland

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Gun control really works - here's the science to prove it

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There are more than 38,000 gun deaths in the US every year, and approximately 85,000 non-fatal injuries. Despite some restrictions on gun research, scientists have sought to evaluate how certain policies affect gun deaths. Policies that seem to reduce rates of gun violence include stricter background checks, limiting access to dangerous weapons, and prohibiting domestic abusers from owning weapons.

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news analysis

The country's leaders want a solution, not just the problem, to become a global phenomenon.

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A makeshift memorial to those killed in the mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, including an image of a kiwi, the bird that's a symbol of the country. Credit Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

By Damien Cave

Mr. Cave is the Australia bureau chief for The New York Times.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - The ad hoc memorial at the police cordon spread out across a wide area. Within a few hours of the terrorist attack that stole the lives of 50 people at two mosques here, there was a mountain of flowers and handwritten messages filled with anguish.
"This is your home and you should have been safe here." "Our love and prayers and sympathy are with you." "Christchurch, Christchurch, what will we do?"
The memorial was the first thing I saw when I arrived outside the first mosque the gunman targeted. Like many others, I snapped a few photos of the memorial and posted one to Instagram. But then immediately, I had a moment of déjà vu. I'd taken a very similar set of pictures in 2016 when I was covering the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla.

The Pulse attack had seemed like such an American nightmare - a mass shooting driven by hate - and now that nightmare had found its way to the other side of the world, to a laid-back country where violence is so rare that there isn't even any airport security when you fly to regional hubs.

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A memorial near the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where a gunman killed 49 people in 2016. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

From the vantage point of this city of 375,000, the signature American exports of our age were not freedom and Hollywood fantasy but rather a cocktail of gun culture, white supremacy and Facebook, where the killer live-streamed the attack with a camera that gave it the look of an American video game.

And while the causes have spread along with Instagrammable memorials, the question emerging here a week later is whether potential solutions can be globalized too.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is doing what she can to lead the way. She announced a ban on military-style assault rifles and ammunition Thursday. She has hammered social media companies for allowing and amplifying extremism. She even went to a high school this week, which lost two of its students in the attack, and told the children they need to fight prejudice.

"Let New Zealand be a place where there is no tolerance for racism," she said. "That's something we can all do."

And yet, it's hard to see how places like New Zealand can ever feel safe without some changes internationally. "We need to understand American laws because they affect us," one commentator said on Radio New Zealand this week.

Indeed the lack of legislative effort by American lawmakers on the issues that helped spawn the Christchurch attack - guns, racism and tech platforms - is no longer just a frustration in the United States. Now it wounds the world.

There's hard work to be done for that to change. The solution is not praying for victims or praising Ms. Ardern on Twitter. What New Zealanders want is for Americans to learn from others, for globalization to go the other way, even if it means limitations on fundamental U.S. of A. freedoms.

On guns, countries like New Zealand have less to confront: Of the 3.9 million New Zealanders of gun-licensing age, 238,000 - just 6 percent - have a firearm license, according to the website GunPolicy.org. In the United States, three in 10 adults say they own a firearm.

Tech companies are another challenge. Despite a growing body of research showing that the algorithms of YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms push people further into violent extremism, getting those companies and their employees to dial back their self-regard and shift their priorities may be as hard as persuading gun owners to give up their AR-15s.

And let's be honest: Those are the easy things to fix compared with racism and white supremacy.

Some Muslims in Christchurch are hoping that the unity of the community and New Zealand officials will set a new standard.

"If we can use what happened here to say enough is enough, if we can promote what we call in New Zealand 'aroha,'" said Mustafa Farouk, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, using the Maori word for love, "maybe the people behind these shootings will change."

But according to others, the changes will need to become more common, below the ranks of public figures.

Here in Christchurch, one of the first people I contacted when I arrived was Kumar Yogeeswaran, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Canterbury who studies diversity and received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts.

We discussed the deep societal problem of not just violent racism but also the casual racism that feeds it. He said many of his nonwhite students in Christchurch have come to him with stories of ethnic slurs hurled at them or colleagues at work mocking their accents. In the aftermath of the attacks, he said some students have heard white New Zealanders express anti-immigrant sentiments, asking why they're here and why they've come.

"When an earthquake hits, the whole community grieves together," Mr. Yogeeswaran said. A mass shooting that killed mostly immigrants - all of them Muslim - has not quite done the same, some New Zealanders said, noting that the unaffected have been quicker to move on while others fear additional violence from extremists across the ideological spectrum.

In 2008, I wrote an article about Derek Black, who was then trying to run for local office in Florida as a white supremacist. He later renounced those views, and we were in touch this past week, emailing a bit about how New Zealand and the world could accelerate and expand the shift he made from hate to inclusion.

"When Ardern says that the people who were attacked 'are us,' that has to become a sentiment that does not sound surprising or untrue to people," he said. "This is a long process of people, particularly white people, redefining their in-groups and national identity."

Mr. Black thinks the only way to do this is for people not to isolate themselves.

The memorials I saw were perhaps a baby step in that direction, our shared emotions made visible in lilies and words that linger.

But some people did not stop there. On Thursday, I met Michael Tarren-Sweeney, a professor of child and family psychology, as he was leaving the funeral of Junaid Ismail, one of the victims. Mr. Tarren-Sweeney told me he worked with Mr. Ismail's sister, and when I shook his hand he had dirt on it from participating in the Muslim tradition of burial, in which mourners toss handfuls of earth into the grave.

Just behind him, leaning against a concrete pole at the cemetery's edge, was Caitlin Phillips. "I'm just paying my respects," she said. She had an iPhone in her hand. Had she seen news of the funerals on social media? Had she gone to the memorials?

"No, I live around the corner," she said. "I just wanted to come because I've lived here 18 years, all my life, and I've never seen anything so wrong."

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of New Zealand's public-service radio broadcaster. It is Radio New Zealand, not New Zealand Radio.

Damien Cave is the bureau chief in Sydney, Australia. He previously reported from Mexico City, Havana, Beirut and Baghdad. Since joining The Times in 2004, he has also been a deputy National editor, Miami bureau chief and a Metro reporter. @damiencave

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Mass Shootings, an American Export. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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New Zealand Confronts an American Export: Mass Shootings

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news analysis The country's leaders want a solution, not just the problem, to become a global phenomenon. By Damien Cave Mr. Cave is the Australia bureau chief for The New York Times. CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - The ad hoc memorial at the police cordon spread out across a wide area.

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NZ PM Jacinda Ardern vows to change gun laws

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NZ PM Jacinda Ardern vows to change gun laws

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After the shooting last week, the Prime Minister of New Zealand declares she will be making changes to their gun laws.

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By Nick O'Malley and Helen Pitt

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New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed to change the nation's gun laws after confirming the "primary perpetrator" in Christchurch's terror attack used five weapons.

"I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change. There have been attempts to change our laws in 2005, 2012 and after an inquiry in 2017. Now is the time for change," Ms Ardern told reporters in Wellington on Saturday morning.

Two Australian gun law experts have welcomed the tightening of New Zealand gun laws.

Rebecca Peters, who was the chair of Australian National Coalition for Gun Control at the time of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, said New Zealand had the opportunity to tighten its gun laws at the same time but did not.

"New Zealand could have joined the Australian reforms as it was the Australasian police ministers council reviewing the gun laws but they did not join. Instead they held their own inquiry and did not implement those recommendations," she said.

She said New Zealand laws were very similar to those in New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland prior to Prime Minister John Howard introducing gun reforms in light of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

"They could have had all the policy benefits of the work done in Australia on guns but did not choose to join us," she said.

Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor and the director of GunPolicy.org, a global project of the Sydney School of Public Health, says that none of the recommendations of a detailed review of New Zealand firearms policy in 1997 after two high-profile police shootings were adopted and as a result the nation's gun regulations remain lax.

That review, conducted by the retired High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp, recommended that firearms should be individually registered to their owners, called for a buy-back of military-style semi-automatic weapons similar to one of those thought to have been used in the mosque attack and tightened vetting and licensing regulations.

Locals gather to lay flowers near Masjid Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch after a terror attack by a gunman killed 49 people. Credit:Jason South

Not one of those measures was made law, says Alpers, in part due to effective lobbying by special interest groups.

"As the law stands in New Zealand, any person aged 16 or over with an entry-level firearm licence can keep any number of common rifles and shotguns without an official record of those guns being kept anywhere," he said.

"New Zealand's decision not to register 96 per cent of civilian firearms makes it a stand-out exception, alone with the United States and Canada."

At least 49 people were killed and more than 40 injured in shootings at two mosques on Friday, which have since been confirmed as an act of terror.

Ms Ardern said she was advised the gunman obtained a Category A gun licence in November 2017 and "under that, he was able to acquire the guns that he held".

The 28-year-old Australian-born citizen, who was not a resident of Christchurch, used two semi-automatic weapons, two shotguns and a lever-action firearm, she said.

"When people, of course, hear that this individual had acquired a gun licence and acquired weapons of that range, then obviously I think people will be seeking change, and I'm committing to that," Ms Ardern said.

Nick O'Malley is a senior writer and a former US correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Helen Pitt is a journalist at the The Sydney Morning Herald.

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NZ PM Jacinda Ardern vows to change gun laws

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By Nick O'Malley and Helen Pitt Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed to change the nation's gun laws after confirming the "primary perpetrator" in Christchurch's terror attack used five weapons. "I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change.

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Gun control is the attempt, usually by a government, to restrain or stop people from owning or using guns. Gun control may also regulate the making, moving, and selling of guns. People want gun control because guns are very dangerous. Gun control is very controversial in some countries, such as in the United States. Some countries such as the United States, Switzerland, and Israel allow people to own guns to defend themselves, but most countries do not.

Gun Control in the United States

Because of the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution, every American citizen has the right to "keep and bear arms". This has been taken to mean that most people can own guns. Originally, it was thought that the federal government could not ban guns, but states and cities could. However, in 2010, the Supreme Court said that states and cities could not ban handguns. Although banning all guns is not allowed anymore, states and cities can still stop the sale and use of certain kinds of guns, such as guns that fire many bullets very quickly. They can also say that certain people, such as criminals, cannot own guns. There is a strong "gun lobby" in the United States. It is led by the National Rifle Association, which supports the right to own guns. They want it to be fairly easy to get a gun. Other groups, such as the Brady Campaign, want guns to be hard to get because they believe that guns cause violence, injury and death. Some states have very strict gun laws, but others, such as Arizona, Utah, and Mississippi, do not.

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Gun control is the attempt, usually by a government, to restrain or stop people from owning or using guns. Gun control may also regulate the making, moving, and selling of guns. People want gun control because guns are very dangerous. Gun control is very controversial in some countries, such as in the United States.

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Excerpt from Geoffrey Canada’s

Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America

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Excerpt from Geoffrey Canada’s

Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America

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Newtown shooting details revealed in newly
released documents

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Newtown shooting details revealed in newly
released documents

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What Does Gun Violence in America Really Cost?

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What Does Gun Violence in America Really Cost?

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Should the U.S. Have Tougher Gun-Control Laws?

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Should the U.S. Have Tougher Gun-Control Laws?

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Policy Issue: Gun Control and the Second Amendment

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FULL
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Policy Issue: Gun Control and the Second Amendment

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Newsela | Policy Issue: Gun Control and the Second Amendment

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Issue Overview: Guns in America

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Student survivors emerge as critics of current gun laws

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Newsela | Student critics of modern gun laws speak out

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America's students emerge as voice of opposition to current gun laws.

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PRO/CON: Is it time to pass tough gun control laws?

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Newsela | PRO/CON: Is it time to pass tough gun control laws?

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For or against stricter gun control laws?

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Understanding key terms in the gun control debate

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Newsela | Understanding key terms in the gun control debate

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Gun regulations can vary from state to state