America and Guns

There are twice as many guns per person today as there were in 1968, yet gun ownership has become more concentrated than it was a half-century ago.

About a third of American households have a gun today -- down from over half in the late 1970s. Half of all the guns in circulation are owned by 3 percent of gun owners, who average 17 guns apiece.

There were roughly 11.8 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2016 -- six times as high as Canada and almost 50 times higher than Great Britain. Nevertheless, the rate of gun deaths is lower today than the 13.5 per 100,000 it was 50 years ago, and far lower than the 15.2 per 100,000 of 25 years ago.

Almost two-thirds of firearm deaths are suicides, a small number of which are also homicides or even mass shootings. Among gun homicides, the vast majority are committed with handguns, and victims and perpetrators are overwhelmingly poor and working class, and disproportionately Black.

Police killed almost 1,100 people in the US in 2016, far, far more than any other wealthy nation -- and far above the total number of deaths from mass shootings, for that matter. Police killings alone would make up more than 5 percent of homicides if they were counted as such.

Since 1982, there have been at least 97 public mass shootings across the country, with the killings unfolding in 34 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. Fifty-eight of these mass shootings have occurred since 2006...

More than half of the cases [from an analysis of 62 mass shootings from this period] involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 20, respectively); the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings. Forty-four of the killers were white males. Only one was a woman.

During the holiday shopping season of 2015, Americans bought three times as many guns as Australia collected over the course of its yearlong nationwide buyback in 1995-96. Meanwhile, the cost of implementing a similar program in the United States -- simply in terms of purchasing-related expenses and not including enforcement costs produced by inevitable noncompliance -- could easily surpass $100 billion.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43686-how-do-socialists-take-on-gun-fundamentalism