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We don't need other countries to prove gun laws work. Our own states show the same thing.

Alex Radelich on Unsplash

As the U.S. grapples with a return to mass shootings, debates about gun legislation have once again taken center stage. Mass shootings tend to be a catalyst for these conversations, but they're actually only one part of the issue. The U.S. is a total outlier among high-income nations when it comes to gun violence in general. No other country even comes close to our gun death rates.

One of the most common arguments against gun legislation is that gun control laws simply don't work. Criminals don't follow laws, restrictions just punish responsible gun owners, etc.

We often look to other nations that have gun laws that appear to work. Comparisons between nations is tricky, though, and we don't even have to do that. We have plenty of evidence that gun laws work right here in our own country.

(I hear the "What about Chicago?!?" question echoing already—I promise, we'll get to that in a minute.)

In the U.S., most gun laws exist at the state level, so we have 50 sets of data we can examine to see how effective these laws are. The fact that there are no border checks between states muddies the waters a little bit (Chicago being a prime example—again, we'll get there in a minute), but there actually are significant differences in gun death rates between states.

For example, in 2019, Massachusetts had a firearm mortality rate of 3.4 deaths per 100,000 population. Alaska had 24.4 per 100,000—a full eight times higher. And the next two states on both ends come in at 3.9 and 24.2, so it's not like Massachusetts and Alaska are outliers. The death rate pretty steadily increases as you go down the firearm mortality rate list, which you can see from the CDC here.

So what does this have to do with gun laws? Well, let's take a look at the states with the highest and lowest gun death rates and see how they stack up against the gun laws in those states. (These gun law rankings come from the pro-second amendment AZ Defenders' list of "Best States for Responsible Gun Owners," based on how loose or how strict state gun laws are. The rankings for gun death rates come from the CDC.)

Among the top 10 states for strict gun laws, the top seven of them are also the top seven states for lowest gun death rates. If that's a coincidence, it's a pretty big one.

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What about the states with the least restrictive gun laws? Of the top 10 on that list, five of them are also in the top 10 for highest gun death rates.

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If you directly compare all 50 states based on of strictness of gun laws and gun death rates, the pattern couldn't be clearer. States with stricter gun legislation tend to have lower gun death rates and vice versa.

It's also worth noting that states we might expect to have high gun death rates because of their big urban centers—namely New York and California—actually have some of the lowest gun death rates in the country. And states that have mostly rural populations have the highest gun death rates. Huh.

Don't those rural states just have more guns, though? Well, yes. There is a clear correlation between the rate of gun ownership and the rate of gun deaths by state as well. (Which pretty much nixes the "If everyone had a gun, we'd all be safer" argument.)

But aren't a lot of those numbers suicides? Yes. Nearly two-thirds. Guns are absolutely the most immediate and lethal method of ending one's life, and the mere presence of a firearm in the home dramatically increases the chances of dying by suicide. Gun ownership is considered a risk factor for suicide, so if we want to reduce both suicides and gun death rates overall, we need to be honest about how the ubiquitousness of guns in the U.S. contributes to both problems and do what we can to mitigate it.

Based on the stats we've seen here, if we want to lower gun death rates in the U.S., we should either enact federal gun legislation or try to reduce the number of guns overall somehow. Personally, I think the former is preferable and more realistic.

What about Chicago, though? Don't they have super strict gun laws and super high gun death rates?

Actually, not really and not really. Chicago used to have stricter gun laws, but its firearms ban was lifted by the Supreme Court in 2010, and its concealed carry ban was lifted in 2012. And while Chicago has seen a tragic uptick in shootings this past year, a simple search shows that it hasn't even been in the top 10 cities for murder rates on any list for years. In fact, it often doesn't even make the top 20. While the numbers themselves are jarring and every shooting is a tragedy, the numbers are so large because Chicago's population is huge, not because it's the gun violence capital of the country. It's not even close.

And having lived in the Chicago area myself, I've seen firsthand how easy it is to drive 30 minutes to Indiana, where gun laws are looser than they are in Chicago or Illinois in general. In fact, according to The 2017 Gun Trace Report, the majority of guns used in crimes in Chicago come from out of state, which is all the more reason we need federal laws that cover the whole country. Having fifty different sets of laws when there are no checks at state borders is simply ludicrous if we want those laws to be the most effective.

We have plenty of evidence that gun legislation works when it's enacted and enforced across a wide geographic area. Other countries prove it. Our own states prove it. And the vast majority of Americans, including most gun owners, want it.

It's long past time to make it happen.


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Why is gun control such a tricky issue? This smart metaphor sums it up.

Right now, we live in a country where it's estimated there may be more guns than people.

The southeast Asian nation of Indonesia doesn’t just stretch across some 17,000 islands. It also straddles multiple tectonic plates.

Indonesia is home to more active volcanoes than any other country in the world — around 130 of them, in fact. Since 1900, nearly 20,000 people have been killed by volcanos in the area around Indonesia.

Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Image via Jialiang Gao/Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists working for the United Nations have also predicted a 30% likelihood that the coming century will see yet another volcanic explosion in Indonesia, probably on the scale of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, which was responsible for the deaths of up to an estimated 100,000 Indonesians.

But despite these dangers, the slopes of many of Indonesia’s volcanoes are far from empty.

Mount Dieng regularly vents lethal gases into the air; 149 people in a single village were killed because of those gases in 1979. Today, half a million people still live in high-risk areas around the volcano.Communities of potato farmers have steadily expanded up the slopes, getting ever closer to Mount Dieng’s highest-danger zones every year.

And nearly a million people live in the highest-danger zone areas of Mount Merapi, too, directly in the crosshairs of regular lava flows, mudslides, and other disasters.

Mount Merapi in Indonesia. Image by Brigitte Werner/Pixabay.

Only eight years after 69 people were killed by a volcanic dome collapse in 1994, 93% of residents told visiting scientists they did not fear being "personally affected" by such events. Even when the government issued warnings of imminent threats or tried to force farmers to evacuate during ongoing volcanic episodes, many villagers simply refused to leave the volcano.

This risky behavior might seem mind-boggling from the perspective of Americans, most of whom who don’t live or work near volcanoes that regularly spew lava.

But consider this: Experts estimate that in Indonesia, there are about one million guns in civilian hands (legally or otherwise), which translates into a rate of about .5 firearms per 100 Indonesians.

In the United States, estimates of civilian gun ownership vary, from 270 million civilians by one estimate to 310 million or more by another. Because gun data like that isn't officially gathered, it's really hard to put an exact number on it. But it's pretty clear we're just about at a rate of one gun for each individual American, well above the half a gun per 100 Indonesians.

So, it turns out, our behavior is quite risky, too.

Academics, politicians, and everyday Americans endlessly debate the links between gun ownership and specific kinds of gun violence – and even over what "counts" as "gun violence."

But if you flex your imagination and adopt the perspective of an outside observer, the relationship between Americans and their guns might look just as outlandish as that between Indonesian farmers and explosive the volcanoes on which they live.

In any given year, more than 30,000 Americans will have their lives ended by a bullet. Yet nearly 40% of Americans in 2013 reported that they or someone else in their household owns a gun. Plus, U.S. gun sales have hit record highs over the past decade, and they show no sign of slowing down. In a way, many Americans are living on a proverbial volcano.

Welcome to America. Image via Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons.

"What are these people thinking?" a foreign questioner might ask. "Don’t Americans get that guns are risky?"

The answer to this question is complicated. When it comes to evaluating human choices in the real world, there is no single, universal yardstick for weighing "risk."

Humans aren’t coolly rational decisionmakers; our emotions and biases shape how we view the world. An impressive body of research suggests that humans have baked-in cognitive biases that don't help us when we're evaluating scenarios and weighing potential dangers. We often make misguided decisions because of those biases.

"Guns are objects invested with meanings, shaped by social norms and cultural attitudes."

Because of this, "risk" isn’t a given, objective quantity in the same way that odds are in a coin toss. Risk involves a perception; it's a subjective judgment on which we all have biases. Risk, to many people, feels relative and abstract. When Americans debate gun ownership solely in terms of risk, we’re often not really talking about risk at all or even numerical data. We’re actually fighting over what we think guns mean ideologically.

And that’s why the answer to this question of risk is also simple.

If risk is in the eye of the beholder, then different people will make different judgments about risks and danger. Their assessments will depend on where they come from, particularly in terms of race, gender, class, and geography.

Just like the potato farmers, most American gun owners are very acutely conscious of questions involving risk. In fact, gun ownership is usually all about weighing concerns about safety and danger, only according to many different calculi.

Let’s talk for a second about cognitive biases and risk perceptions.

In purely statistical terms, driving a car is immensely more dangerous than being a passenger in a plane.

This is actually more risky than flying in a plane, according to data. But which experience feels more scary? Photo via Jace Turner/Pixabay.

But, irrationally, most people are still more afraid of planes than cars. Why? Research shows us that people are more scared of being the object of circumstances beyond their power than they are afraid of risks they feel like they can control.

Turning to motivations for gun ownership, we see the cars-versus-planes bias again, particularly when it comes to fears about being defenseless against crime. 20 years ago, only a quarter of polled gun owners named "self-defense" as the primary reason for owning a gun. As of 2014, nearly half of polled gun owners cited protection as their primary motivation for buying a gun in the first place.

That crime rates have dropped sharply since the 1990s while the market for guns has only grown suggests that the perception of crime as a threat matters more than anything else when someone buys a gun.

We see this complicated question of risk and guns very clearly in the admittedly terrifying idea of home invasion, too.

Although only 7% of burglaries involve physical harm to a home’s occupants, having your private space violated by intruders, with you and ones you love left at their mercy, is rightly the stuff of nightmares.

Statistics can feel like bloodless abstractions compared to the viscerally horrifying image of the people you love, helpless and terrorized. Against the fear of abject helplessness, the decision to own a gun "just in case" gains attractiveness.

Let’s not forget that the media bears a degree of complicity here as well.

People prefer to consume information that fits their biases, and that information further cements those biases. Bad news captures our attention more than otherwise unremarkable stories. We also overvalue bad news and assume that it signals negative trends.

"The perception of crime as a threat matters more than anything else when someone buys a gun."

The morning newspaper doesn’t tell the story of everyone who went to work safely and then came home last night to have a quiet dinner with their family. Instead, a high-casualty mass shooting at an office or a horrific late-night home invasion will make headlines and fuel gun purchases. What’s more, of the 30,000-plus Americans who will be shot to death in any given year, a full two-thirds of those shots will be self-inflicted. But suicides are rarely reported while murders may receive extensive coverage.

For all of these reasons and more, people are likely to overestimate the likelihood of being the victim of a murder while neglecting the other risks associated with having a gun in the home.

As deadlocked fights over gun control suggest, debating data really won't get us anywhere.

Gun control isn't about the numbers; it's about feelings and perceived risks, and that is that. Guns are objects invested with meanings shaped by social norms and cultural attitudes.

Image screenshot via RidleyReport/YouTube.

It can be easy to project your own experiences and expectations onto those whose ways of life are different from your own, but race, class, and gender intersect with experiences of risk and vulnerability and make these kinds of issues much more complicated.

Back to the volcano-dwelling potato farmers of Indonesia. What can they teach us?

Researchers studying risk perception have become kind of obsessed with these people, and they’ve discovered a variety of explanations for the farmers’ risk attitudes and decisions: religion, cultural beliefs, education, views of governmental authority figures, and more.

Terraces in Indonesia. Photo via Globe-trotter/Wikimedia Commons.

But researchers have also noted a consistent theme in their interviews with the farmers: Most of these farmers are conscious of the risks they face, but they take them anyway.

Some of the farmers say they have no other choice: Dying in a toxic gas leak is only a possible risk, but the grim outcome of being unable to harvest their crops and feed their families feels like a certain risk. Their choice to live on a volcano may seem irrational from the outside, but — when put in terms like these — the decision seems to make all the sense in the world.

Indonesia isn’t America. Guns aren’t volcanos. And the decision to own a weapon is different in many ways from reckoning with ecological risks.

But something holds true across both cases: Numbers aren’t emotions, and our decisions aren’t reducible to statistics alone.

If we want to understand where other people are coming from in the gun control debate, understanding how perceptions are built is vital.

Right now, we live in a country where it's estimated there are more guns than people. This is a thorny problem, but I'd guess that solutions will only come from communicating well with each other well and from trying to grasp where different people are coming from — if only as a bare minimum first step.

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3 points Julianne Moore totally nailed in her candid essay on guns.

The actor has had it with gun violence, and she wants your help demanding change.

Like many of us, Dec. 14, 2012, was a tough day for actress Julianne Moore. She had to explain the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary to her young daughter.

Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.

"I wanted to explain it and not scare her. But how was I going to tell my young daughter that children were massacred in their classrooms?"

Moore opened up about the experience in an essay she wrote for Lenny, a feminist newsletter launched by the creator of HBO series "Girls" Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner.

Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images.

"At that moment, it felt ridiculous to me, and irresponsible as a parent and as a citizen, that I was not doing something to prevent gun violence," she explained of the conversation she had with her daughter, who was 10 years old at the time.

So she decided to speak up.

In her essay, Moore totally nails why it's more necessary than ever to act on gun control.

Here are three takeaways from the piece:

1. Gun violence hurts everyone, but it uniquely affects women.

"Women in the United States are 11 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than women in [other high-income nations]. More than half are killed by a boyfriend, husband, or someone else in her family."

Moore is right: The 2003 study that figure comes from and another similar one with 2010 data support that American women are disproportionately affected by gun violence. An alarmingly high number of these women are killed at the hands of their male partners, so the disturbing overlap between accessibility to guns and domestic violence is one that shouldn't be ignored.

2. Guns shouldn't be as controversial an issue as it is; even most gun owners agree that more regulation is necessary.

"A majority of [gun owners] approve of common-sense gun-safety measures. Around 90 percent of them support universal background checks. A large majority of American citizens believe we need to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals, like stalkers and terrorists."

Polling has shown theoverwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners, support implementing universal background checks — a move, Moore argues, that would keep guns out of the hands of "dangerous people," including abusive boyfriends and stalkers.

3. Gun control won't get rid of gun violence entirely, but it can make a significant difference. Just look at the car industry.

"I believe that gun-safety laws can reduce gun violence, even if they don't eradicate it, because of the example set by the automobile industry."

Approaching gun control the way we approach driver safety makes a lot of sense.

As Moore explains, we've regulated the car industry through things like licensing and training. We've added new technologies and safety precautions, like seat belts and airbags, and have passed laws setting speed limits and outlawing drunk driving. Largely due to these steps, the auto fatality rate has dropped dramatically in recent decades. Wouldn't a similar affect happen if we took the risks associated with guns as seriously as we do the risks inherent with driving?

Moore's essay is an honest and eye-opening take on the realities of gun violence.

The actor encourages readers to learn more about and support Everytown for Gun Safety — a group dedicated to keeping guns in safe hands only.

"We need you to continue to turn the tide on gun violence," she wrote. "And I know that we can do it together. I don't ever want to have to explain another Newtown to my kids, and neither should you."

Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images.

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His wife was murdered in cold blood. Now here's what he wants you to know about guns.

Jan. 27, 2016, marked the 11th anniversary of the night that a teenaged kid pointed his gun at my wife — a beautiful, talented young playwright and actress, my best friend, my soul mate — pulled the trigger, and put a single bullet through her chest.

All photos provided by J. Ray Sparks.

I knelt beside her in the street and begged her to hold on, to stay with me, to stay with her family. She tried hard. But after just a couple of minutes, she let go of her last breath, and along with it went any vision of a future I had. There would be no children. There would be no home. Instead there would be a dozen photographers and reporters waiting for me at every turn as the search for her killer proceeded and the story of her murder made its way into news outlets around the country.

Thankfully most people reading this will not know how this feels or be able to fathom the emotional and psychological scars left by such an experience.

Yet every single year in the United States, over 30,000 people die by bullet — about the same number as those who die in car accidents. Death by bullet is becoming the second leading way to die for American young people.

The death of any person, by any means, becomes a major issue in the lives of the people who love and lose them. Sudden, unexpected deaths like accidents leave different scars than those that are anticipated. And murder has its own deep, bitter brand of grief. Murder isn’t an accident. It’s not a disease. It’s a decision.

A popular slogan used by many American advocates for the constitutionally guaranteed right to own guns is "Guns don’t kill people. People kill people."

I absolutely agree. People murder other people by many different means. A simple hammer can be used to fracture a skull. A car intended for transportation can be used to run a person over. A gun is no different in this sense.

But guns are different in some key ways. Guns are, by design, the most efficient tools to use to commit murder. And unlike cars, guns are not strictly regulated. Guns purchased legally are easy to convert to the black market.

Selling a stolen car without having it traced back to the thief is a tricky business because every car in the U.S. is given a unique identification number, which if removed has to be replaced with a counterfeit number that is cloned from a legal car that is the same make and model of the stolen car. More often than not, stolen cars are completely dismantled and sold as parts rather than undertaking that more complicated approach.

All it takes to render a gun untraceable is a simple metal file used to remove the serial number.

There is no national registry of gun serial numbers. The gun used to murder my wife was a Brazilian-made Taurus .357 Magnum. It was legally imported to the U.S. and initially legally sold. Eventually someone committed the crime of selling it on the black market after the serial number was scratched off.

With the gun rendered untraceable, there was no means of holding any of the criminal gun traders accountable thus assuring the continued steady flow weapons into the hands of other criminals. But Taurus still made the same profit from the sale of that gun as they did on every other gun, properly licensed, and owned by law abiding citizens. The black market is good business for the gun makers. And both they and the National Rifle Association know that.

My wife’s killer was identified by a friend of his who saw the story on TV.

He was captured, convicted, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. After the trial, I did my best to move on and start a new life. Of course it was very difficult. New Yorkers were very kind to me when they recognized me, which happened often for years after. I got a great new job and moved into the neighborhood where Nicole had most wanted to live. I made wonderful new friends who gave me so much support. But I had a huge hole … a profound emptiness that I did my best to hide.

Eventually I felt like I needed to go somewhere far, far away, where nobody knew the story. A place where I could start over again and be perceived as a normal person by people around me, rather than "that guy." The place I chose was Berlin. That was six years ago, and to this day, most people there don’t know my story. And I like it that way.

But the subject of gun regulation in the U.S. has weighed more and more heavily on my mind in recent years.

Mass shootings occur on a weekly basis in the U.S., and an average of 30 gun murders happen every single day, even though the overall rate of violent crime has been dropping for years. The Gun Violence Archive shows for the year so far (through Feb. 22, 2016), there already have been 29 mass shootings and over 1,700 deaths from guns, with more than 400 of killed or injured from guns being children under 18.

That’s a lot of broken hearts and homes. And given that 2016 is a major election year, I feel like those of us who walk through life with huge invisible holes in our hearts because of gun violence need to be publicly outspoken and active in working to elect representatives who will work to enact truly effective regulations to reduce gun violence.

The person who murdered my wife was not a career criminal.

He was a teenager from a poor neighborhood who was understandably frustrated with his environment. Neither he nor most of his friends with him at the time had ever even committed a mugging. It was his first time robbing someone, and he was nervous. He was definitely not the smartest kid on the block.

Yet because gun regulations so facilitate the black market, he was able to obtain an untraceable handgun. And it only took one moment of really bad judgement to take a young woman’s life, to send himself to prison for life, and to shatter the hearts and dreams of an entire extended family. It should have been harder for him to get the gun. It should be harder now.

I grew up shooting guns competitively in the midst of the gun culture of the South.

I have no problem with the Second Amendment or the abstract idea of citizens being allowed to own guns. The vast majority of people who own guns handle them safely and never use them for crime.

As one of those citizens, what I want in a nutshell is for guns to be regulated similarly to cars. Generally, legislation aimed at increasing public safety on the roads is viewed as positive. Legislation that does the same for guns should also be viewed positively, by both gun owners and others alike. It’s time for a citizen lobby to outspend and outmaneuver the NRA in favor of the common sense gun laws America needs.

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