I have two boys in school. I coach travel baseball through Crooked Number, which means I spend a lot of weekends at fields full of other people’s kids. Both of those facts mean I have done, more than once, the thing parents in this country now do: walked into a school or a stadium or a tournament complex and quietly noticed the sight lines, the exits, where I’d put the kids if I had to. I don’t think most parents in any other wealthy democracy do that, because they don’t have to.
That’s where I start with this one. Not at the 2nd Amendment, not at the politics, not at the culture-war script. At the actual experience of being an American parent at this particular moment, which is that we have organized our daily routines around the possibility of being shot at, and we mostly pretend we haven’t.
I’m not anti-gun. I know plenty of responsible gun owners — hunters, sport shooters, rural neighbors whose nearest police response is half an hour away. None of what follows is about taking their guns. It’s about looking at what the data actually shows, because I think the conversation we keep having about this is mostly an argument the gun lobby paid to make sure we’d keep having, and very little of it tracks with what’s true.
what the numbers actually say
The United States had 44,447 gun deaths in 2024, the most recent year with complete CDC data. That’s the lowest figure in several years — gun deaths dropped 7% from 2023, the largest single-year decline since 1995, and the trend looks like it continued into 2025. That’s real and worth saying out loud. We are not at the peak of this anymore.
We are also still, by an enormous margin, an outlier. The US gun death rate is about 12.8 per 100,000. Canada is 2. Australia is around 1. Japan is 0.2. We’re not talking about a marginal difference. We’re talking about six times Canada, twelve times Australia, sixty times Japan.
About 60% of US gun deaths are suicides — roughly 27,600 in 2024, a sixth consecutive annual increase in gun suicides specifically. The other 40% is homicides, accidents, and police shootings. Both categories matter. A gun in the home increases suicide risk by roughly three times and homicide risk by roughly two times compared to homes without guns.
Mass shootings, by the most inclusive definition (four or more people shot, not counting the shooter), totaled 499 in 2024, down 24% from 659 in 2023. Again, real progress, and again, still a number no other rich country comes close to.
One more piece of context: in February 2025, the Trump administration cut federal funding for gun violence research and prevention programs, and in July 2025 ended the LGBTQ+ specialized line on the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Researchers I’ve read since have flagged concern that the suicide trend in particular could get worse with those tools gone. We’re about to find out whether the decline survives the loss of the people studying how to keep it going.
what works and what doesn’t
This is the part where the political conversation in the US is most disconnected from the actual research, so I want to lay it out plainly.
What works: universal background checks (states that have them see about 15% fewer gun deaths). Mandatory waiting periods between purchase and possession (gun suicides down 7–11%, gun homicides down about 17%). Red flag laws that allow family or police to temporarily remove guns from someone in crisis — Connecticut’s law was associated with an estimated 72 prevented suicides over 14 years; Indiana’s with a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides. Safe-storage and child-access-prevention laws cut unintentional shooting deaths among children by about 23% and youth suicides by about 8%. Permit-to-purchase laws — requiring a permit and often safety training before buying — are associated with about an 11% drop in gun homicides and a 27% drop in gun suicides. When Connecticut repealed its permit law in 1995, gun homicides went up 15%. When Missouri repealed its in 2007, they jumped about 25%.
What doesn’t work, despite getting most of the airtime: the “good guy with a gun” stopping mass shooters is statistically rare. FBI data on 433 active-shooter incidents between 2000 and 2021 found armed civilians stopped the shooter 4.4% of the time. Unarmed civilians stopped the shooter 9.1% of the time, in part because armed civilians are routinely mistaken for the shooter by police or other armed civilians. Arming teachers has no evidence base; teachers aren’t trained law enforcement, and adding more guns to schools adds risk. And the “it’s a mental health problem, not a gun problem” framing doesn’t survive contact with the data — people with serious mental illness commit only about 3–5% of violent crimes. Better mental health care matters for many reasons. It will not, by itself, solve this.
the standard arguments, and what the evidence shows
A few of these come up so consistently they’re worth taking on directly.
“Criminals don’t follow laws anyway.” By that logic we shouldn’t have laws against murder or fraud either. Laws don’t need to stop 100% of crime to be worthwhile — they need to make harmful behavior harder and less frequent. Background checks don’t stop every criminal from getting a gun. They stop a lot of them. The contrast with every other wealthy country, all of which have gun regulations and all of which have a fraction of our gun death rate, is hard to wave away.
“Any regulation leads to confiscation.” This is the slippery slope the gun lobby has spent billions promoting. The actual experience of every other developed democracy is that you can regulate guns without banning them. Australia is the case study people usually point at, and it’s worth getting the story right. After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, Australia implemented licensing, registration, mandatory safety training, and a ban on semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. They bought back about 650,000 guns. Firearm suicides fell roughly 65%. Firearm homicides fell roughly 59%. Australians kept hunting, kept sport shooting. Millions still own firearms legally.
On December 14, 2025, that streak of nearly three decades without a mass shooting ended at Bondi Beach, where two ISIS-inspired attackers killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration. One of the shooters held a legal Australian firearms license and was the registered owner of six guns. Australia’s response was not to throw up its hands. Within days, the government announced a new national buyback. In January 2026, Parliament passed tighter licensing, tighter background checks, and tougher hate-crime laws. The country that had already shown what gun regulation can do moved to do more. Whatever else you take from that story, “any regulation just leads to confiscation” is not what’s happening there, and never has been.
“We need guns to resist tyranny.” This is the most philosophically interesting argument and also the one with the cleanest internal contradiction. The people most worried about government tyranny tend to support expanding police power, military spending, and surveillance. Many of them are reflexive defenders of the police even when officers kill unarmed citizens — which is, by definition, government violence against the people. If genuine fear of state power were doing the work here, the priorities would look different. And no wealthy democracy with strong gun regulations has descended into tyranny. The correlation isn’t there.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Yes, people pull triggers. But one person with one rifle can kill thirty people in a few minutes. One person with a knife usually can’t. We don’t let civilians buy grenades or tanks because we already accept that some weapons are too dangerous for general ownership. The question is just where the line goes and whether we draw it based on evidence about what reduces deaths or based on what sells more guns.
The reason none of this becomes law at the federal level isn’t mystery, and it’s not “both sides.” Most American gun owners support background checks. Most support red flag laws. Most support safe-storage requirements. The Sandy Hook universal background check bill had something like 90% public support and was filibustered by Senate Republicans. After Parkland, red flag laws were blocked. After Uvalde, raising the AR-15 purchase age from 18 to 21 was blocked. In 2023, Tennessee Republicans expelled two Democratic state lawmakers for protesting gun violence on the House floor after the Covenant School shooting. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996 after NRA lobbying, effectively shut down CDC gun research for two decades — and the Trump administration’s 2025 cuts have brought that chilling effect back. If you can’t study a problem, you can’t fix it. That’s a feature of the strategy, not a bug.
The NRA, for what it’s worth, isn’t primarily a gun owners’ group. It’s a gun manufacturers’ lobbying organization, and between 2005 and 2013 it received somewhere between $20 million and $52.6 million directly from gun makers. Its incentive is to maximize sales, and its strategy is to convince ordinary owners that any regulation is the leading edge of confiscation. That strategy has been spectacularly successful, and it has cost a lot of lives.
I think most Americans — including most gun owners — actually want roughly the same thing here. Background checks. Waiting periods. Safe storage. Red flag laws. Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. None of it requires giving up the 2nd Amendment. None of it requires giving up hunting or sport shooting. All of it is consistent with what every other wealthy democracy already does. We just have to stop letting an industry-funded lobby and a small group of politicians decide for the rest of us that 44,000 deaths a year is the price of doing nothing.
Even that's Odd 
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