What explains the mass shootings in the US? International comparisons suggest one answer: guns

when the world looks at Americahe sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and films.

But there is a particularity that constantly puzzles to fans and critics across the United States. Why, they ask, many are produced mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it’s because American society it is unusually violent. or why them racial divisions they severed the bonds of society. Or why its citizens lack of mental health care appropriate in a healthcare system often derided abroad.

These explanations have something in common: although they seem sensible, all were denied for investigations into shootings in other parts of the world. On the contrary, a growing body of research is systematically arriving the same conclusion.

The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in the United States is its astronomical number of weapons.

What explains the mass shootings?

The headline figures suggest a correlation which, if investigated further, it becomes clearer.

Americans make up about 4.4% of the world’s population, but owns 42% of the world’s firearms. Between 1966 and 2012, 31 percent of mass shooting perpetrators worldwide were Americans, according to a 2015 study by adam lankfordprofessor at the University of Alabama.

adapted to the population, only Yemen has a higher shooting rate massive among countries with more than 10 million people, a distinction Lankford urges to avoid outliers. Yemen has the second highest gun ownership rate in the world, after the United States.

Lankford found that across the globe, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlates with the likelihood of a mass shooting.

This relationship remained even when the United States was excluded, indicating that it could not be explained by other factors specific to its country. And it held up when you checked the homicide rates, suggesting mass shootings they are best explained by a society’s access to arms than by its level of baseline violence.

What not: crime, race or mental health

If mental health made a difference, the data would show Americans have more mental health problems than people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the US mental health spending rate, the number of mental health professionals per capita, and the rate of severe mental disorders are in line with those of other rich countries.

A 2015 study estimated only this 4% of deaths gunshot wounds in the United States could be attributed to mental health problems. And Lankford, in an email, said the countries with high suicide rates tended to have low mass firing rates, the opposite of what one would expect if the mental health problems were related to mass shootings.

The fact that a population play more or less video games This also doesn’t seem to have any impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.

The racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little relationship between immigration or other measures of diversity and rates of gun homicides or mass shootings.

a violent country

The gun homicide rate in the United States was 33 per million population in 2009, well above the average for developed countries. In Canada and Britain it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million respectively, which also corresponds to differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see it as an expression of deeper problems with crimean idea rooted, in part, by a series of films depicting urban gang violence in the early 1990s.

But the United States is actually no more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California at Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime it’s just more deadly. For example, a New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of violence in the United States, It was about weapons.

More gun ownership means more firearm homicides in almost all axes: Between developed countries, between US states, between US towns and cities, and when controlling crime rates. Y gun control legislation tends to reduce homicides with guns, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This suggests it the weapons themselves are the cause of the violence.

Mass shootings happen everywhere

Gun control skeptics sometimes point to a 2016 study. Between 2000 and 2014, the death rate from mass shootings in the United States was found to be 1.5 per million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting that mass shootings in the US weren’t all that common.

However, the same study revealed that there were 133 mass shootings in the United States. Finland has only had two, in which 18 people died, and Switzerland has had one, in which 14 died. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, only yesIt’s a matter of course in the US.

As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to completely erase. Any individual can explode or get carried away by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood this will lead to a mass murder.

In China, in a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren, 25 people were killed between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a firearm.

Conversely, during the same period, five of his mass shootings took place in the United States more deadly, in which 78 people died. In terms of population, US attacks they were 12 times more lethal.

Beyond the stats

In 2013, firearm deaths in the United States included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides, and 505 deaths caused by accidental discharge. That same year, in Japan, a country with one-third the population of the United States, firearms were implicated in only 13 deaths.

This means that an American is about 300 times more likely to die by homicide or gun accident than a Japanese. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times that of Japan. That difference between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone don’t explain what makes America different.

Even the United States has some of the weakest controls in the world On who can buy a gun and what kind of weapons you can have.

Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of all developed countries, about half that of the United States. Its 2004 gun homicide rate was 7.7 per million population, an unusually high number, consistent with the ratio of gun ownership to homicide, though still a fraction of the rate in the United States.

Swiss gun law is more severe, since it establishes a taller rod to obtain and maintain a license, to sell weapons and for the types of weapons that can be owned. These laws reflect more than just tougher restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something citizens do must be affirmatively earned the right to have

The difference is in the culture

The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that start from the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to guns.

The main reason that regulation of gun ownership in the United States is so weak may be that concessions are simply given different weight in the United States than elsewhere.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after an incident in 1996. But the United States has repeatedly been faced with the same calculus, determining that gun ownership relatively unregulated worth the cost to society.

That decision, more than any statistic or regulation, is what distinguishes America most.

“In hindsight, Sandy Hook marked the end of the gun control debate in the United States,” wrote Dan Hodges, a British journalist, in a Twitter post two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at a Connecticut elementary school. “Once the United States decided that killing children was tolerable, it was all over.”.

The New York Times