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When it comes to gun violence, the rest of the world looks at the United States and asks itself, "WTF?"

Despite that Americans make up less than 5% of the world's population, we account for nearly a third of all mass shootings and own 42% of all guns worldwide. According to the Gun Violence Archive, 15,586 people died as the result of gun violence (including suicides) in 2017, giving us a per capita rate of gun deaths eight times higher than Canada, 32 times higher than Germany, and 55 times higher than the United Kingdom.

Our unwillingness to address this problem has made us a laughingstock to the rest of the world. While people will point to things like mental health or video games as possible causes of gun violence, it's clear that those aren't the issue because every other country has the same video games and comparable rates of mental illness.

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