'Gun Violence' To 'Gun Control' in The United States: Top Questions About Gun Laws in The US Answered

If you have not followed the news surrounding the recent mass murder at a school in the United States of America, here’s a fact sheet that answers the ten basic questions surrounding the recent gun violence in the country.

What happened on February 14 in Florida, US?

Nicholas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida opened fire at the school campus killing 17 people including students and staff. Cruz used a semi-automatic gun for the massacre that he had purchased legally. Cruz was arrested barely an hour after he fled the scene and will now stand trial for his crime.

How many people die in the US due to guns?

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence estimates that around 114,994 people are shot each year in the US. This includes murders, assaults, accidents, police intervention, suicide attempts and suicides. More than 38,000 people died by guns in 2016, preliminary CDC reports indicate. In 2015, there were 36,000 gun fatalities, and about 33,500 people died annually from 2012 to 2014.

How many school shootings happened in 2018?

The Florida mass shooting was the eighteenth school shooting since January 1, 2018. Eight of those mass shootings saw either someone injured or killed.

How many children are shot each day in America?

Nineteen children are shot in the U.S. every day. Three die, on average, a study released this year in the journal Pediatrics (U.S.) found.

What is a mass shooting?

The U.S.’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines a "mass murder/shooting" as four or more murders during the same incident. Other organizations tracking gun violence count four or more people shot at and injured in a single incident as a mass shooting. Mass shootings account for less than 1.2 percent of annual gun deaths in the U.S., the New York Times estimates, using figures from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive.

What is gun control?

“Gun control” is a broad term that covers any sort of laws, regulations or restrictions on what kinds of firearms can be sold and bought, who can legally own them or sell them, where and how they can be stored or carried, what duties a seller has to vet a buyer, and what obligations both the buyer and the seller have to report transactions. In recent years, there has been increasing demand and debate for creating stricter background checks for those wanting to own guns in the U.S. There are two major federal laws that regulate firearm ownership and sales in the U.S.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 prohibits civilian Americans from owning automatic weapons, short-barreled shotguns, hand grenades, and other fully automatic weapons. The Gun Control Act of 1968 focuses on commercial trade of guns. This law prohibits the sale of weapons through the post, and requires anyone in the business of selling guns to be federally licensed and keep permanent sales records. It also prohibits knowingly selling a gun to those with prior criminal records, minors, and a few other categories of people.

What did former president Barack Obama do to enhance gun control?

The most significant Obama gun control measure was not a law but a rule that required the Social Security Administration to report disability-benefit recipients with mental health conditions to the FBI’s background check system, which is used to screen firearm buyers. Obama's successor, Republican President Donald Trump, rescinded the rule in 2017.

Why do civilian Americans have the ‘right to own a gun’?

The U.S. is one of only three countries in the world where the right to own guns for self-defence is protected in the constitution. The U.S. Constitution, specifically its Second Amendment states, "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." This has been for two centuries interpreted to mean that every American has the right to bear arms for self-protection. In fact, according to the Cornell University’s brief on the Second Amendment under this "individual right theory," the United States Constitution restricts legislative bodies from prohibiting firearm possession, or at the very least, the Amendment renders laws prohibiting an individual to own a fire arm as unconstitutional.

How many people own guns in America?

The US tops the list of countries with the most guns, owning about half the world’s guns while making up only 5% of the world population. With an estimated 350 million guns, as of 2015 there are more guns than people in the U.S. This rate is far higher than other developed nations, according to the Australian research site gunpolicy.org. In relative terms, the U.S. has the highest number of guns per capita. There were an estimated 89 to 100 guns for every 100 Americans in 2013–around one firearm per person.

India is home to the second-largest civilian firearm stockpile, estimated at 46 million. The most updated estimates -- now more than a decade old -- place the worldwide civilian gun cache at around 650 million. According to Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, the number of civilian guns has most likely risen since 2007.

How does US gun culture compare to the rest of the world?

The top ten civilian owning gun countries are the U.S., Yemen, Switzerland, Finland, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Uruguay, Canada and Austria. But Yemen, home to the world's second-largest gun-owning population per capita (a country in the middle of a three-year-old civil conflict) trails significantly behind the U.S. in terms of ownership.

The gun violence seen in the U.S. in recent years has often been described as a gun epidemic. The latest mass shooting has rightly reignited the debate for stronger rules and laws to control gun ownership.  Yet, the anti-gun lobby has not managed to get its demands translated into action at the federal government level. In fact, gun laws have grown weaker over the past 20 years while guns available in the market have become more technically advanced.

Will Americans come together to stop this scourge of gun violence? Will history be made this time? Only time will tell.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Feb 20, 2018 12:38 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).