There’s no mystery about why the U.S. has so many gun deaths

The tragic mass shooting last weekend in a Dallas suburb took place as I was leaving the country to visit Britain. I might as well have taken one of Elon Musk’s rockets and landed on a different planet. The Allen, Tex., massacre means that, so far in 2023, more than 15,000 Americans have died from gun violence. In 2021, the last year for which we have complete data, there were 48,830 gun-related deaths, of which 20,958 were gun homicides. In England and Wales, there were 31 gun homicides. Even accounting for its larger population, calculating deaths per 100,000 people, the United States in 2019 had roughly 100 times as many gun homicides as the United Kingdom. 

A comparison of suicides is equally depressing. In 2021, 26,328 Americans took their own lives using guns. About half of the people who kill themselves in the United States use guns to do it. In the U.K. in 2019, that number was 117, and of all suicides, death by firearm is one of the rarest methods. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has about 44 percent of the world’s gun suicides. 

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