Search results
- Canada. As in the United States, Canada’s national government sets gun restrictions that the provinces, territories, and municipalities can supplement. And like its southern neighbor, Canada’s gun laws have often been driven by gun violence.
- Australia. The inflection point for modern gun control in Australia was the Port Arthur massacre of 1996, when a young man killed thirty-five people and wounded nearly two dozen others.
- Israel. Military service is compulsory in Israel, and guns are a part of everyday life. Much of the population has indirect access to an assault weapon by either being a soldier or a reservist or a relative of one.
- United Kingdom. Modern gun control efforts in the United Kingdom have been precipitated by extraordinary acts of violence that sparked public outrage and, eventually, political action.
- Introduction
- United States
- Canada
- Australia
- Israel
- United Kingdom
- Norway
- Japan
The debate over gun control in the United States has waxed and waned over the years, stirred by frequent mass shootings in civilian settings. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the United States. In particular, the ready availability of assault weapons and ammunition has provoked national discussion after mu...
Gun ownership in the United States is rooted in the Second Amendment of the Constitution: “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.” The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has 46 percent of the world’s civilian-ow...
Gun ownership is also relatively high in Canada, at about thirty-five firearms per hundred residents (ranking fifth globally), but the country does not struggle with a similar level of gun violence. As in the United States, Canada’s national government sets gun restrictions that the provinces, territories, and municipalities can supplement. And lik...
The inflection point for modern gun control in Australia was the Port Arthur massacre of 1996, when a young man killed thirty-five people and wounded nearly two dozen others. The rampage, perpetrated with a semiautomatic rifle, was the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history. Less than two weeks later, the conservative-led national government p...
Military service is compulsory in Israel, and guns are a part of many Israelis’ daily lives. Much of the population has indirect access to an assault weapon by either being a soldier or a reservist or a relative of one. By law, most eighteen-year-olds are drafted into the military, psychologically screened, and provided at least some weapons traini...
Modern gun control efforts in the United Kingdom (UK) have also been precipitated by extraordinary acts of violence that sparked public outrage. In 1987, a lone gunman armed with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun went on a six-hour shooting spree roughly seventy miles west of London, killing more than a dozen people and then himself. In the wa...
Gun control had rarely been much of a political issue in Norway—where gun laws are viewed as tough, but ownership rates are high—until a right-wing extremist killed seventy-seven people in attacks in Oslo and at an island summer camp in 2011. Though Norway ranks fourteenth worldwide in gun ownership, according to Small Arms Survey, it placed near t...
Gun control advocates regularly cite Japan’s highly restrictive firearm regulations in tandem with its extraordinarily low gun death rate. Most years, fewer than one hundred Japanese die from gun violence in a country of 125 million people. Most guns are illegal in the country and ownership rates, which are quite low, reflect this. Under Japan’s fi...
Nov 26, 2021 · Some nations have high gun ownership due to illegal stocks from past conflicts or lax restrictions on ownership, but the US is one of only three countries in the world where bearing (or...
Mar 24, 2021 · The U.S. has the 32nd-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019. That was more than eight times as high as the rate in Canada, which had 0.47...
- Nurith Aizenman
People also ask
How does gun culture in the US compare to the world?
Which country has the highest gun violence rate in the world?
How common is gun violence in low-income countries?
Are guns illegal in the United States?
Jan 30, 2023 · News. Home. U.S. Remains an Outlier in Firearm Possession, Gun-Related Deaths. In 2017, U.S. civilians held an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the highest rate in the world by a...
- Chris Gilligan
- Contributor
Jun 24, 2015 · The fact is that if NRA claims about the efficacy of guns in reducing crime were true, the US would have the lowest homicide rate among industrialized nations instead of the highest homicide rate...
Jan 26, 2023 · More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for...
