Debunking 4 Major Myths of an Assault Weapons Ban
Gun safety at issue in presidential campaign after school shooting in Georgia…
Published in
7 min readSep 5, 2024
Once again, a mass shooting tragedy is dominating the news due to the murder of multiple people Wednesday at a high school in Winder, Georgia. This has thrust the issue of gun safety reform squarely into the 2024 presidential campaign.
Thus far, there have been more mass shootings than days in the year (385 according to the Gun Violence Archive). Here are a few other shocking statistics to consider:
- There are more firearms among the American civilian population than people — over 400 million according to a global ranking by the Small Arms Survey.
- “No other country has more than 46 million guns or 18 mass shooters — the U.S. is way worse than the Philippines, Russia, China or India.”
- Americans alone own 40% of all guns in the world, more than all civilians combined in 25 other countries.
- A survey by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva found the gun ownership rate for Americans is 120 firearms per every 100 people.
- For comparison, the rate of firearms ownership for Japan and Indonesia is about one gun per every 100 people.
