Firearms intheUnitedStatesWhat the Numbers Say

The United States has more civilian firearms than residents. According to the Small Arms Survey, American civilians owned nearly 400 million firearms at the end of 2017, or 120 per 100 residents: nearly half the civilian firearms in the world. Yemen, ranking second, had 53 per 100.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, fits in a single sentence: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." For two centuries, legal scholars argued over the meaning of this sentence: a collective right tied to the militia, or an individual right?

The Supreme Court settled the question in 2008, by five votes to four: District of Columbia v. Heller recognized an individual right to possess a firearm at home. In 2022, Bruen extended it to carrying a firearm outside the home, ruling that restrictions are only valid if consistent with the nation's "historical tradition" of firearm regulation. In 2024, Rahimi allowed temporarily disarming an individual deemed dangerous to others by a court, in this case under a domestic violence restraining order.

Buying from a gun dealer nevertheless requires a background check: this is the Brady Act, signed by Bill Clinton on November 30, 1993, named after James Brady, Ronald Reagan's press secretary, shot along with him during the assassination attempt of March 30, 1981. From 1998 to 2014, over 202 million background checks blocked about 1.2 million purchases. Private sales between individuals not engaged in the business of dealing firearms are exempt.

Mass shootings claim rouge:100 to 200 lives per year, according to criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University. Their grip on the public imagination is largely driven, he notes, by relentless media coverage of events that remain rare. The Violence Project records 1,446 deaths over sixty years: fewer than firearms claim in two weeks.

The deadliest committed by a lone shooter occurred on October 1, 2017. In Las Vegas, from a 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay hotel, Stephen Paddock fired for ten minutes into the crowd of the Route 91 Harvest country music festival: 60 dead, about 867 injured, including at least 413 by gunfire, with more than a thousand rounds fired using rapid-fire bump stocks. *Banned by the federal government in December 2018, they became legal again on June 14, 2024: in Garland v. Cargill, the Supreme Court ruled they do not convert a rifle into a machine gun.*

Yet the shootings remembered most are not the deadliest overall, but those in schools. Columbine, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Sandy Hook, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012: 26 dead inside the school, including twenty children aged six and seven, the deadliest at an American primary or secondary school. Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018: 17 dead, fourteen students and three adults. Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022: 21 dead, nineteen students and two teachers—and seventy-seven minutes before federal officers killed the gunman.

The death toll of Columbine itself changed in 2025. Anne Marie Hochhalter was seventeen on April 20, 1999; a bullet left her paralyzed. She died on February 16, 2025, at age forty-three, of sepsis. The Jefferson County coroner concluded that complications from her paralysis were a "significant contributing factor" in her death, and that the manner of death was "best classified as homicide." Columbine's victims thus rose from thirteen to fourteen. A death can be added to a toll twenty-six years later.

For ten years, a federal statute targeted these weapons. Signed by Bill Clinton on September 13, 1994, the assault weapons ban also prohibited new magazines holding more than ten rounds; it expired on September 13, 2004, under its sunset clause. A 2019 study found that mass shooting deaths were 70% less likely during those ten years, but the effect on overall firearm homicides was minimal (0.1%), and RAND found evidence inconclusive regarding state-level assault weapon bans.

No two organizations count them the same way: there is no official definition, and each database uses its own.

These numbers say nothing of the pain of each loss. They merely remind us that the toll is made elsewhere, far from the cameras.

In the United States, three out of four homicides are committed with a firearm. Of the 20,162 homicides in 2024, 15,364 were committed by gunshot, nearly 16% fewer than a year earlier according to Johns Hopkins.

The benchmark synthesis by the RAND Corporation, The Science of Gun Policy, assigns its highest evidentiary rating to two laws that worsen the death toll. "Stand your ground" laws, which remove the duty to retreat before defending oneself, and "shall-issue" concealed-carry laws, which require issuing permits to any applicant meeting basic criteria, are associated with more homicides.

Law enforcement shootings are only a fraction of the roughly 1,500 deaths that, in the 2024 tally, were neither suicides nor homicides. Yet they are the most undercounted fatalities: according to a study in The Lancet, from 1980 to 2018, official statistics missed 17,100 of the 30,800 deaths due to police violence, all weapons combined, or more than half.

Americans do not assault one another more often than residents of other wealthy nations, notes the Johns Hopkins Center; but with more guns and weaker laws, their assaults kill more often. In 2015, according to a study in Preventive Medicine, their firearm homicide rate was about twenty-five times that of other high-income nations combined.

Since 2020, firearms have killed at least as many American children and adolescents as motor vehicles. According to the Johns Hopkins Center, they have been their leading cause of death for the fifth consecutive year: 2,214 deaths aged 1 to 17 in 2024. From 2014 to 2024, according to the KFF foundation, nearly 22,000 minors died from gunfire.

Because they kill at young ages, firearms cost Americans over one million years of life lost before age 65 in 2024: more than diabetes, stroke, and liver disease combined, according to Johns Hopkins.

In 2024, 27,593 people took their own lives with a firearm, a record high. A gun is involved in more than half of suicides in the country. These deaths pass almost unnoticed: they occur one by one, and the press rarely covers them—rightly so—to prevent copycat behavior, the Werther effect.

Why does the presence of a firearm in the home change the overall death toll rather than simply shifting the method? Because, the WHO reminds us, many suicides occur impulsively during brief moments of crisis: when a loaded gun is close at hand, passing distress turns in seconds into an irreversible death, before the crisis passes or loved ones can intervene. Approximately nine out of ten firearm suicide attempts are fatal.

This is where laws have demonstrated effectiveness. RAND identifies its highest level of supportive evidence for two policies: minimum purchase age laws protect young people, and storing guns under lock, out of children's reach, reduces suicides, accidents, and homicides among minors. It also considers it probable that a waiting period before purchase has the same effect, by letting the impulse pass.

Bullets do not kill the same America depending on who pulls the trigger. Homicide kills Black Americans first, and the young: in 2022, according to the CDC, their rate reached 27.5 per 100,000, nearly fourteen times that of non-Hispanic White Americans. That year, more than half of gun homicide victims were Black. Native Americans follow, then Hispanics.

Over the past decade, death by gunfire has been gaining ground among non-White women: from 2015 to 2024, according to Johns Hopkins, the fatal shooting rate of Black women jumped 63%, and their firearm suicide rate rose 169%, while rates for White women barely shifted. For an abused woman, her partner's access to a firearm increases her risk of being killed by him.

Bullets turned against oneself delineate the other America: White, Native American, older, with rates peaking after age 75. These deaths weigh on rural counties, homicides on big cities. Illinois and North Dakota lose equal proportions of lives to gunfire; but in Illinois, more than half are homicides, compared with barely one in eight in North Dakota. Across all intents, one dies by gunfire more than seven times more often in Mississippi than in Hawaii.

Guns are primarily owned by White Americans, rural residents, and Republicans. According to Pew, one in three adults owns a gun—nearly one in two rural residents versus one in five urbanites, and twice as many Republicans as Democrats. Seven in ten gun owners state that protection is a major reason for ownership.

In 1993, a study by Arthur Kellermann linked the presence of a gun in the home to an increased risk of homicide. The National Rifle Association went after the CDC, and in 1996 Congress passed the Dickey Amendment: no injury prevention funds could be used to "advocate or promote gun control." The same legislation redirected 2.6 million dollars from the CDC to traumatic brain injury research: down to the exact dollar what the agency had spent the previous year studying firearms. The text did not prohibit research; the CDC almost stopped doing it. Jay Dickey, the congressman who had sponsored the amendment, would say in 2015: "I have regrets." Funding was not restored until December 2019: 25 million dollars, split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

For twenty-three years, the nation possessing the most guns in the world allocated virtually nothing to study what they do. Death certificates, meanwhile, kept arriving: about 120 per day.