USA fails to find a remedy to frequent occurrences of gun violence

Opponents of gun regulation frequently portray the prevalence of gun violence in the US as a sign of a larger mental health issue. However, extremists and those with mental health disorders are a concern in every nation. What makes the US special is its broad view of civilian gun ownership, which has been engrained in politics, society, and the law since the country's establishment, as well as a national political system that has so far been unable to alter this standard. For the first time in nearly 30 years, Congress secured an agreement on modest gun regulations last year.

Since there is no national database where people may register whether they own weapons and because there are no effective federal regulations against gun trafficking, it is difficult to determine the quantity of privately owned guns in America. According to one estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a research organization with Swiss roots, there were about 390 million guns in use in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 guns for every 100 citizens. Given that one in five households bought a gun during the epidemic, it is likely that this percentage has increased during the intervening years. However, even without taking that rise into account, US gun ownership remains well above that of any other nation: Only 52.8 weapons are owned per 100 people in Yemen, which has the second-highest gun ownership rate in the world, compared to 31.7 in Iceland.

According to a Harvard and Northeastern University research from 2016, a tiny fraction of households—just 3 percent—own about half of all the country's firearms. They are known as "super owners," and they each have an average of 17 firearms. In 2021, according to Gallup's analysis of data using a different technique, 42% of all American households had access to firearms.

There is no doubt that there is a connection between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some researchers even claim that this connection is causal. For instance, a 2013 study from Boston University revealed that the state firearm homicide rate rose by 0.9 percent for every percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level. According to a research released in January by the pro-gun control organization Every Town for Gun Safety, states with laxer gun laws also have greater incidence of gun-related killings and suicides.

According to a study by Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who looks at measures to minimize gun violence, if it were possible to cure all cases of schizophrenia, bipolar illness, and depression, violent crime in the US would decrease by only 4%.