america armed and dangerous there are now some 40 million handguns firearms injuries represent an epidemic epidemic of gun violence join us in this campaign to reduce gun violence the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun another mass shooting in america good guy shooting 316 people are shot every single day [Music] gun violence a topic that's deeply divisive in america a country where guns are embedded in everyday life as of 2018 it was estimated that there are approximately 400 million civilian-owned guns in america that means there are more guns than there are people or cars in the u. s by comparison americans own more guns per capita than any other country accounting for about 40 of the world's total gun ownership and that number is likely to increase since 2008 the u. s firearm industry's worth grew 232 percent making it a 63.
5 billion dollar industry in 2020 but the reason for division over gun ownership isn't just because the u. s owns the most guns it's because it also has the highest rate of mass shootings gun related homicides and firearms suicides among similarly developed nations our politics is just not being incentivized to pay attention to the things that would actually reduce gun violence this is the job of public health to help the most vulnerable to stand up for them so how did we get here how has the right to own a gun become a divisive american ideal and of all the proposed solutions what do experts say could effectively reduce gun violence in the u. s around the 19th century there were at least nine countries that had the right to bear arms in their constitution but as years passed most of these countries made changes revoking or limiting gun rights as of 2021 only three countries cite the right to bear arms in their constitution and the united states is one of them the second amendment activism was not at the center of early gun culture and for a long time most people in the us own guns but it was really for hunting target shooting it was associated with masculinity so it was kind of a rite of passage but it was not about rights and the law the idea of gun control didn't really enter the national conversation until 1934 following a mass shooting in chicago most gun regulation laws were passed without much opposition until 1968 when president lyndon b johnson signed the gun control act but this started to change years later when the nra became an advocacy organization centered on the second amendment bringing with it a huge influx of money it really changed after the cincinnati revolt in 1977 when there was a coup inside of the nra second amendment activists took the nra over and then in the 2000s it switched again to being a mostly republican gun lobbying organization nowadays the nra spends between two to five million dollars annually lobbying for gun rights and during the 2020 elections alone the association spent 29 million dollars in political campaigns and we believe in freedom and liberty and the right to keep and bear arms [Applause] in 1983 the cdc really started looking at gun violence as a public health problem when they created the violence epidemiology branch the nra looked at this and they said if you do this research it's going to end up in everyone losing their guns it's either the research or your guns you can't have both you've got to decide this was misinformation but it was a powerful strategy for the nra eventually congress deferred funding for gun violence research by passing the dickey amendment in 1996 which prohibited the cdc from using federal funding to advocate or promote gun control after its implementation the cdc spent more than 20 years without the resources to conduct significant research on gun violence it was a threat it was a shot across the bow that had big impacts particularly in the field of data collection if you're getting your data collection done by you know a private foundation or you know some other source you don't have what researchers have described to me as the full faith and credit of the us government behind it that makes it easier if you have that full faith and credit to get agencies and get states on board and get that data collected the need for research was finally recognized shortly after the mass school shooting in parkland florida that left 17 dead in 2018.
a clarification was made to the dickey amendment allowing the cdc to conduct research on the causes of gun violence this research is going to find those ways that we can keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them without infringing on the rights of those people who should but in order to understand how we can potentially reduce gun violence let's first dive into the numbers around it each year approximately 40 000 people die in america from firearm injuries the u. s saw the peak of gun ownership in 1993 with an estimated 51 percent of households owning a gun that same year gun homicides also reached its peak you know when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail when you have easy access to guns and you have lots of guns available to you more problems look like problems that can get solved with them there very much is a correlation between the number of guns in a place and the number of gun deaths in a place and that's something that you can see consistently across the board year after year the places that have more guns have more gun deaths but if you look at just the injuries and deaths you're missing a very big part of the problem for every individual life that's destroyed there's a family that's destroyed there's a community that's shattered the cost of anxiety of fear and worry is tremendous and while most gun owners cite safety and protection as their reason for owning a firearm research shows that having a gun in your home doesn't necessarily keep you safer what we found was that not only does having a gun in your home not make you safer but it increases the risk that someone in your family will be killed by a gun will be a victim of gun homicide and it increases it hugely not by 10 15 20 25 not by a hundred percent by 200 the risk that someone in your family will be shot and killed with a gun triples and the risk that someone in your family will commit suicide with a gun goes up 400 percent it's multiplied five-fold and suicides make up the largest portion of firearm deaths two-thirds of all gun deaths in america are suicides and most of the people that are killing themselves with guns in the u. s are older white men who are gun owners then you have another one-third that are homicides when you're talking about the homicides you're predominantly talking about younger black men and when you talk about women being killed in homicides you're predominantly talking about domestic violence when we shift to mass shootings they only account for a small percentage of gun deaths each year but they've also become more common and more deadly in recent years the politics of gun violence has you know over the last couple decades really centered around things like mass shootings terrorism accidental gun deaths in small children but if you actually go and look at the data again what you find is that those are not making up the majority of gun violence deaths they're not even making up a significant minority abc news combined forces with the gun violence archive to document a week's worth of gun violence and found that in a single week in july 2021 there were more than 1 000 incidents of gun violence across 47 states that's about one every 10 minutes and in those incidents more than 400 people were killed despite the gap in federal research limited data shows that implementation of certain gun regulations and laws have been effective at a state level for example in indiana the red flag law has been associated with a 7.
