Introductory Chapter: A World of Gun Violence

1. Introduction

As of the date of this writing (September 3, 2023), there have been almost 13,000 gun killings in the United States this year, plus another 16,000 suicides and more than 25,000 gun-related injuries. Further, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 480 mass shootings (roughly two per day), over 900 police officer-involved shootings, and over 1600 accidental shootings [1]. The United States, with just 4% of the world’s population, accounts for approximately 25% of global gun deaths. The United States also outpaces the rest of the world in gun ownership and, most obviously, in mass shootings at sites like schools, shops, and churches, which Australian Prime Minister John Howard called “the American disease.”

Because of its epidemic of firearm violence, the United States monopolizes much of the attention on the subject. However, since gun violence is not unique to that country, nor is American gun violence or its gun culture and gun-centered politics typical, we cannot use America as a lens through which to understand and intervene in such violence everywhere. Accordingly, in this introductory chapter—and in this volume—we will take a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to gun violence. Here, we will first unpack the concepts of “gun” and “violence,” then explore the facts of firearms-related death and injury around the world and its human, economic, and political cost, before considering some explanations for the international plague of gun violence and comparing policies and practices for preventing the pain and suffering caused by people with guns.

2. Understanding the “gun” and “violence” in gun violence

Gun violence is one of those subjects on which almost everyone has an opinion and which almost everyone thinks they understand, whether or not they know the facts and have thought seriously about their meaning. Indeed, we cannot grasp gun violence until we have clarified what we mean by “gun” and “violence.”

When most people think of guns, they probably picture either handguns or “assault rifles,” if not both. However, there is much greater variety of guns that must be considered if we are to think usefully about controlling and regulating them. To start, the American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) uses the term “firearm” to cover the diverse category of guns, which it defines as any weapon “and all components and parts thereof, not over .50 caliber which will or is designed to or may be readily converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive,” explicitly excepting BB guns, pellet guns, and antique guns such as muzzle loaders, matchlock, and flintlock guns ([2], p. 8).

Firearms are commonly divided into two major classes—handguns and long guns. Handguns, consisting of pistols and revolvers, are shorter and normally held in one hand. Long guns, as the name suggests, have longer barrels and are usually held with both hands. They include rifles and shotguns; the term “carbine” is sometimes reserved for compact rifles, and the class of long guns also features so-called “assault rifles” or military-style weapons like AK-47s and AR-15s (the preferred device of American mass shooters). Finally, the category of firearms also includes machine guns and sub-machine guns, which are seldom owned by civilians.

In addition to these familiar types, there are other and often newer forms of guns that have made policing and tracking guns much more difficult. Among these are 3D printed guns, which individuals with the proper equipment can make at home. There are also “ghost guns,” which are often assembled from kits or parts bought separately; as such, they do not possess serial numbers, allowing owners to circumvent licensing, registration, and background checks. Also problematic are “concealable” firearms that resemble everyday objects such as pens and phones and are thus harder to detect; on the other hand, less problematic but still potentially deadly are “craft production” firearms (handmade by artisans), “rudimentary” firearms (made, often by criminals, out of materials or parts not explicitly intended as guns), and “replica” firearms (copies of historical guns, for collectors) [3].

If the concept of “gun” is complicated, the concept of “violence” is still more so. Dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of violence begin (and often end) with the simple notion of physical force, as in Britannica’s “an act of physical force that causes or is intended to cause harm,” at least acknowledging that the resultant harm can be physical or psychological and that violence is not synonymous with aggression [4]. However, two of its most articulate students, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, insist that violence “can never be understood solely in terms of physicality—force, assault, or the infliction of pain—alone”; hence, they expand the concept to include “assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim” ([5], p. 1). Violence is also obviously not synonymous with crime: all crime is violation and harm, but some crimes are nonviolent (e.g., property crimes), and some violence is noncriminal, such as when committed, within bounds, by police or soldiers.

All attempts to analyze violence concur with Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois that it “is a slippery concept—nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive” ([5], p. 1). For instance, even if force is implied, there is no quantitative cutoff for the amount of force required to constitute violence. Naturally, there are also many kinds of force, from physical to emotional or psychological to “structural,” that is, the social or institutional forces or conditions that disadvantage and harm individuals or groups unequally (hence the term “structural violence”). There is also the matter of intent: did the perpetrator intend or plan to harm the victim, or was the injury unintentional, accidental, or negligent? This takes us to the subjective or internal state of the perpetrator, which may be difficult to determine—also raising the issue of mental incompetence or insanity. Finally for the moment, there is the variable of legitimacy. Another renowned scholar of violence, David Riches, rightly asserts that some acts of physical harm, up to and including death, are legitimate uses of force, at least from certain perspectives [6]. There are circumstances when deadly force is justified, as in self-defense. There are entire roles and institutions of legitimate violence, such as the police and the military. Granted, as Riches admits, such legitimacy can be contested, and the right to legitimate force can be abused (as in police brutality), but questions of legitimacy seriously complicate our understanding of violence. One thing we cannot say is that all uses of force are illegitimate, but that compels us to ask if legitimate force is “violence.”

Another problem is the operationalization of violence, that is, the specific ways in which we recognize and count violent acts. This question is essential for generating meaningful and comparable data on violence, gun-related or otherwise. For instance, different countries, or even different jurisdictions within a country, may operate with different definitions of violence, which affects what they count as violence. Then, someone must report incidents of violence to record-keeping authorities (unreported violence does not get counted), and authorities must organize and collate that information. In the United States, the Uniform Crime Report of the FBI is one method for compiling and publishing data, dependent on input from local police departments (again, if those local data are incomplete, inaccurate, or inconsistent, the UCR will also be). Another tool is the National Crime Victimization Survey prepared by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on interviews of a national sample of the population. As a more active method, the NCVS tends to yield higher numbers than the passive UCR. In countries where methods for counting and reporting violence vary or do not exist at all, the quality and availability of information will also vary or not exist.

3. The violence that guns do

Regardless of these inescapable complexities, guns are involved in many acts of violence (although some gun enthusiasts maintain that guns do not do the violence but that people do the violence). Even so, it is indisputable that not all violence is gun-related and that not all gun use is necessarily violence, by the standards just discussed (from hunting to self-defense). On the former matter, in 2019, the FBI calculated that of the nearly 14,000 murders in the US, just over 10,000 were committed with firearms (6368 handguns, 364 rifles, 200 shotguns, and 3281 unspecified type), but Americans were very creative in their homicidal means, including knives (1476), blunt objects (397), body parts like fists or feet (600), fire (81), and asphyxiation (92) [7]. Worldwide, things are roughly similar: according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, firearms were used in 54% of all homicides, while 22% were committed with knives and 24% with fists, blunt objects, poisons, and so forth ([8], p. 19). More recently, the Small Arms Survey has claimed that of the 531,000 people who died violently (not counting suicide) in 2020, 40% died by firearms (90% of whom were male) [9]. (One problem evinced in these and similar studies is the lack of current information.)

The UNODC makes another pertinent distinction, between “conflict deaths” or killings directly related to war or conflict and “non-conflict deaths.” The number of conflict deaths varies with the incidence of war in any given year, but the UNODC estimates more than one million people died in political or ethnic conflicts between 2000 and 2017, while many more died from non-conflict violence; organized crime killings alone equaled the number of conflict deaths during that period. Non-conflict deaths further divide between intentional homicide, killing in self-defense, killing in legal interventions without excessive force (that is, during the normal and legitimate use of police force), and non-intentional homicide (including negligent and nonnegligent homicide). Finally, intentional homicides encompass deaths due to criminal activity, interpersonal confrontation, and sociopolitical reasons.

As mentioned previously, homicide is not the only or even prevalent form of death by firearm. In the United States, more suicides than homicides are attributable to guns: the Gun Violence Archive calculates 21,000 American homicides by gun versus 26,000 suicides in 2021 [10]. Suicide is a greater problem in some countries than in others (in 2019, Greenland had the highest gun-related suicide rate in the world, 16.36 per 100,000, followed distantly by the US at number two, 7.12, and by the tenth place occupied by Venezuela the rate falls to 2.5 [11]), so suicide accounted for a far lesser percentage of global than American firearm deaths in 2016 (under one-third) [12]. And of course, not all firearm-inflicted injuries are fatal: in 2022 Americans suffered another 38,540 nonlethal gun injuries, on top of the 44,365 fatalities. And those figures do not capture the toll of gun violence on individuals, families, and societies, which reaches beyond individual pain and death to the grief of kin and friends, the loss of parents or children or siblings, the cost of medical care and the burden on the healthcare system, and, in many countries, the sense of omnipresent danger and the threat to governance and the legitimacy of political leaders and law-enforcement authorities. To begin to put a price tag on the tangible costs of gun violence,

A 2019 report from the US Congress Joint Economic Committee concluded that the costs of lost income, employer costs, health care, and police and criminal justice expenses due to gun violence amount to a staggering $229 billion every year. A 2021 study by Everytown for Gun Safety puts the figure at $280 billion annually. Everytown’s numbers include a $34.8 million daily taxpayer tab for medical care, first responders and criminal justice, as well as $1.4 million in economic productivity that employers lose every day when their workers are victims of gun violence [13].

Returning to homicide, the categories of firearm-related murder are highly diverse. Many deaths occur in altercations between individuals, as in interpersonal disputes or domestic violence. Globally, a high proportion of gun (and other) death is related to crime and gang activity, especially in Central and South America, which are often further related to drug trafficking. A particularly if not uniquely American form of firearm violence is mass shooting, in which four or more people die in a single outburst of violence. These incidents tend to receive the most attention in the American media, partly because they seem so senseless and because their victims are usually entirely innocent, but they actually constitute a diminishingly small percentage of total deaths: according to the Associated Press, more than 560 mass killings have taken place in the US since 2006, leaving 2900 dead and another 2000 injured, but compared to the 40,000-plus who die every year in that country, they are a tiny fraction (the 28 mass killings [only one not involving guns] in the first 6 months of 2023—more than one per week—left only 140 victims, a little over 1% of the total 11,000 homicides or less than 1% of the 26,000 combined homicides and suicides during that time) [14]. Still, Americans are properly horrified by mass death in schools, churches, and shopping centers, and much of the rest of the world is stunned and confused by this behavior, which is comparatively rare outside of the United States.

4. Diversity in gun violence across cultures

Some of the preceding observations indicate that gun violence, like most or all human actions, is quite diverse across time and space. We must be cautious not to generalize about the numbers or causes of gun violence when we move from one country to another or even from one part to another of the same country—and we must surely not take the American experience as typical or diagnostic of global gun violence.

First and foremost, countries diverge profoundly in their rates and totals of firearm-related death and injury. Naturally, more populous countries tend to have higher absolute numbers of gun-related death, with some major exceptions (China and Japan have exceptionally low numbers). Brazil and the United States far and away lead the world in total deaths, as depicted in Table 1.

Rank	Country	Total gun deaths (all causes)
1	Brazil	49,436
2	United States	37,038
3	Venezuela	28,515
4	Mexico	22,116
5	India	14,710
6	Colombia	12,169
7	Philippines	9267
7	Guatemala	5980

Table 1.

Countries with the highest total gun deaths, 2019.

Source: World Population Review [11].

The picture is slightly different and quite revealing if we consider gun-related homicide rates per 100,000 of population, as in Table 2.

Rank	Country	Rate
1	El Salvador	36.78
2	Venezuela	33.27
3	Guatemala	29.06
4	Colombia	26.36
5	Brazil	21.93
6	Bahamas	21.52
7	Honduras	20.15
8	US Virgin Islands	19.40
9	Puerto Rico	18.14
10	Mexico	16.41

Table 2.

Countries with the highest rates of violent gun death per 100,000, 2019.

Source: World Population Review [11].

It cannot escape our notice that the countries in these two lists are predominantly located in the Americas. Indeed, the Small Arms Survey documents that North, South, and Central America had the highest percentages of violent death by firearms in the world in 2020 (78%, 71%, and 63%, respectively), while some global regions were at the far opposite end of the spectrum (Western Asia 34%, Eastern Africa 31%, Western Africa 27%, Southern Asia 24%) [9]. This does not mean necessarily that those areas had low violent death rates, only that homicides were not perpetrated with guns. Indeed, in 2016 just six countries—all in the Western hemisphere—contributed half of all international firearm-related fatalities, namely, Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala ([12], p. 792). In stark contrast, Japan suffered only 25 total firearm-related deaths that year and South Korea an unbelievable two [15]. Sadly, the rates of gun-related homicide run parallel to the rates of overall homicide, the Americas leading the world in 2017 with a total murder rate of 17.2, with its closest competitor Africa at 13.0, followed by Europe (3.0), Oceania (2.8), and Asia (2.3) ([8], p. 11). The global homicide rate was just 6.1, a third of the rate in the Americas.

Further—and further complicating matters—countries vary dramatically in their rates of gun ownership. One would expect, perhaps, that the more firearms in a society, the more firearm-related injuries and deaths, but the picture is not so simple. One estimate suggests that in 2017, there were more civilian-owned guns than people in the United States—120.5 guns per 100 of population; no country had even half that many guns per person, with Yemen in second place at 52.8, Montenegro and Serbia tied for third at 39.1 and Canada, Uruguay, and Cyprus in the 34s. No other countries had even one gun per three citizens [16]. The differences are partly explained by culture and history (see below) and partly by the fact that guns enter into homicide unevenly around the globe. For instance, between 2007 and 2018, firearms were only used in one-third of murders in South Africa, and, although the data are spotty, so far in the twenty-first century, the Democratic Republic of Congo has usually seen less than 200 gun deaths per year, although total annual homicides in that country typically exceed 10,000 if not 18,000 [15]. On the other hand, Amnesty International claims that more than half (58.9%) of all killings in Honduras involve guns, with an astounding 72% of Brazilian killings and 91.1% of Salvadoran killings coming at the end of a gun [17].

Upon closer inspection, other variations appear. For example, in all societies some gun deaths are related to policing. According to the Police Violence Report, 1200 Americans were killed in office-involved shootings in 2022, with at least 1000 killed each year over the past decade [18]. In head-spinning contrast, GunPolicy.org claims that Brazilian police were involved in over 6000 firearm homicides in 2019, the country infamous for its militaristic style of policing, especially in poor favela neighborhoods [15]. In many other countries, gun violence is connected with gang activity (often gang competition for territorial control) and drug production and trafficking. Hence, within any given country, some areas (and not always urban areas) experience more gun violence than others, sometimes concentrated in particular neighborhoods or in border regions.

One other factor that must be considered is history. Gun violence is not perfectly consistent over time, as shown by the Brazilian statistics. Before the year 2000, firearm-related homicides in that country did not exceed 30,000. Around that year, gun murders began to escalate, reaching 36,000 in 2009 and 40,000 in 2012, where they remained for several years, peaking at more than 47,000. Guatemala also saw its gun-involved death toll rise in the early 2000s, reaching a high of 5000 in 2009 before settling down to just over half that total. Likewise, El Salvador had an uncomfortably high but steady gun homicide rate until around 2000, when it started to jump, more than doubling to over 5000 in 2015 before dropping to less than half that number 4 years later [15]. Clearly, very specific local and chronological variables must be added to the analysis to make sense of these swings in gun violence.

5. Causes and correlations of gun violence

These comments lead us to the next obvious and urgent topic, which is the cause of gun violence and the correlation between specific social and historical variables and that violence. Each of these issues raises serious research questions that have been and will continue to be subjects of scholarly examination and public debate.

5.1 Gun ownership

It goes without saying that firearms cannot be implicated in violence if they are not available to violent actors. Yet the correlation between guns in a society and gun violence in a society is controversial. Granted, the United States has high rates of both gun ownership and gun violence, but some countries in Latin America have much lower gun ownership together with firearm-related injury and death rates comparable to or in excess of those in the US. At the same time, Switzerland records one of the world’s highest rates of gun ownership—in 2007, the Small Arms Survey counted 46 per 100 citizens—paired with extraordinarily low firearm homicides (15 in 2007 and not more than 30 in any year for two decades and no mass shootings in that time) [19]. Unsurprisingly, the American National Rifle Association points to Switzerland as proof that more guns do not make society more dangerous, but the country has stringent gun regulations that would be inconceivable in the United States.

At the same time, there is also evidence that more guns do make society more dangerous, depending on the society. In a survey of 26 high-income countries, Hemenway and Miller determined that “where guns are more available, there are more homicides” ([20], p. 985). In a subsequent literature review, Hepburn and Hemenway concluded that “households with firearms are at higher risk for homicide, and there is no net beneficial effect of firearm ownership” ([21], p. 417). Clearly, this question will remain open for the foreseeable future.

5.2 Demographic factors

Gun ownership is not an independent or decisive variable, but it is intuitively appealing that other social factors such as poverty and urbanization are linked to gun violence. Here too the evidence is inconclusive or, we might better say, subject to national and regional variation. Altheimer and Boswell compared three parts of the world and found very different patterns. In Western countries, “economic inequality, sex ratio, and urbanization significantly influence gun homicide levels. Importantly, the effect of economic inequality is in the expected direction” ([22], p. 693). In Eastern Europe, though, while inequality, male population, and urbanization correlate to gun homicide, “all of these variables influence gun homicide in a manner opposite of what might be expected;” Latin America is the most curious, where social support for guns significantly increases gun violence but urbanization appears to have a negative effect ([22], p. 694). As for economic inequality, they reasoned that it “exhibited strong positive effects on homicide [in] Eastern European nations, negative effects in Western nations, and no effects in Latin American nations” ([22], p. 697).

5.3 Crime, gangs, and drugs

Depending on the society, crime, gang activity, and illegal drugs—often closely connected—are major factors in gun violence. Firearms are surely used in the commission of other crimes, such as assault, robbery, kidnapping, auto theft, and rape; as mentioned above, some of these crimes are interpersonal (e.g., personal disputes and fights and spouse abuse), some are purely criminal, and some are sociopolitical (among which we might possibly include the recent kidnapping of an American nurse in Haiti, just one of almost 300 so far in 2023).

As gangs have proliferated locally and globally in recent decades and become more violent, gang-related gun violence has become a greater problem. Gangs may use guns against the populace and the police (and the police against gangs in response), but much gang violence occurs between rival gangs, or even within a single gang, as individuals and groups jostle for power and prestige and for the control of territory in which they rule and conduct their illicit activities. Gangs also tend to foster macho attitudes that contribute to male bellicosity and resultant violence, featuring guns or otherwise.

Among these activities, but by no means the only one, is drug production and trafficking. In many instances, drug manufacturing and sale is a relatively simple, highly lucrative, and entirely illegal enterprise, making it attractive to various elements of society. Drug traffickers must defend their business against rivals, government authorities (corrupt authorities sometimes participating in or enabling the trade), and a public that disapproves of their conduct. Americans are most familiar with drug trafficking and so-called drug cartels in Mexico, where reportedly more than 30,000 people have died each year since 2018 in murders, kidnappings, “disappearances,” and other violence (not always by guns). In 2006, the Mexican government “declared war” on drug cartels, greatly intensifying the reciprocal violence, including against journalists, one killed on average every week for several years. In 2022, Mexico militarized its response to the drug trade, empowering the army to perform law enforcement, which observers have already complained “has eroded the treatment of civilians, who face arbitrary detention, rape, and extrajudicial killings” [23].

5.4 Insecurity, weak governance, and failed states

These comments highlight the growing sense of insecurity and imminent danger among many of the world’s citizens. In the United States, one of the primary reasons that people give for gun ownership is self-defense. Carlson calls these gun-wielders “citizen-protectors” [24], and Kohn calls them “citizen soldiers” [25]. By whatever name, Yamane views their “decision to carry a gun as a response to a very broad pattern of socio-economic decline, the feelings of economic and physical insecurity it produces, and related concerns about crime and police ineffectiveness”; in their minds, these protector/soldiers “are morally upstanding citizens exercising their historically masculine duty to protect their families and others” ([26], p. 6). Reflective of this attitude is the spread of “stand your ground” or “make my day” laws in the US, which permit householders to use deadly (usually gun-involved) force to defend their homes and persons.

If many Americans feel unsafe in their homes or on their streets, this feeling is greatly amplified in other parts of the world. Globally, one of the leading reasons for acquiring a gun is self-defense and protection from crime, which is often linked to the perception of the government’s inability to provide security. Law enforcement may not penetrate into the urban neighborhoods or into the remote rural districts where residents feel unsafe and where crime, gangs, armed insurrections, or drug trafficking are rampant. In the best of cases, police and courts may be weak and ineffective; in the worst, they may actually be corrupt and complicit. At the extreme, as with Haiti and its endemic violence, observers may refer to such countries as failed states that cannot perform the basic functions of governance, that is, providing not only security but also basic services like water and electricity.

In many such countries, researchers have chronicled the rise of two complementary forces—the multiplication of “violent actors” and the privatization of security. Violent actors may include everything from gangs and drug traffickers to armed citizen-vigilante groups, professional security companies, and militarized police. All of these players increase the likelihood of violent or deadly confrontations and the proliferation of guns in society, supplied by a licit and illicit international gun trade, much of which emanates from the United States. Privatization of security, then, results when individuals and communities accept or usurp the ideal role of government to guarantee safety and order and arm themselves, or hire armed professionals, to do what police and courts cannot or will not do. In a vicious circle, though, the abundance of guns and of unregulated private security may actually make society less safe and orderly, leading to greater self-arming and violence.

5.5 “Culture of Violence” and “gun culture”

We cannot understand gun violence or violence in general, and especially the differences in violence between even neighboring countries or communities, without considering the role of culture. Culture is a result, an accretion, of history and experience, and various historical experiences mold or scar groups or societies. The notion of a culture of violence (like that of a culture of poverty) is controversial and can never be the full explanation, but it also cannot be ignored.

Among many of the world’s peoples, there are traditions that valorize violence generally (for example, values of honor or vengeance) or guns specifically. Processes of colonization and decolonization often deepened violence and introduced new inequalities and grievances, as in Rwanda (although the explosion of genocidal violence there in the 1990s was largely committed with machetes). Subsequent and recent wars and ongoing gang and drug violence further traumatize populations, as do surging crime, social disorder (e.g., riots, kidnappings, etc.), insurrectionist and guerilla movements like Peru’s Shining Path, and state oppression and violence. Nordstrom chronicles the impact of “living in a state of fear” in Guatemala where terror became routine [27], and Abramowitz discusses how Liberia was rendered a “traumatized nation” after years of war, with fighting in the streets, sexual violence, and a general mood of fear and foreboding [28].

A subset of the culture of violence is the culture of guns or “gun culture,” a phrase coined by Hofstadter in 1970 to characterize American society [29]. America’s gun culture arises from its revolutionary origins, its frontier and hunting traditions, and its unique constitutional guarantee of gun rights. Yet even in the United States, gun culture is diverse and mutable over time. Boine et al. identify three components of this culture—a recreational element, a self-defense element, and an anti-government element tied to the Second Amendment. Indeed, they assert that there is not one American gun culture but several and that emphasis and rhetoric have shifted over time from recreation to self-defense and, more ominously, armed mobilization against an allegedly tyrannical government [30]. Yamane, as noted above, regards this change as the emergence of “Gun Culture 2.0” in the rise of the armed citizen [26].

Springwood among others has studied gun culture around the world, stressing that guns have a “social life” that must be viewed in context [31]. The main point, as Hultin suggests, is that guns, like every other object and artifact, are “invested with particular, often group-specific, meanings” ([32], p. 23]). Among these meanings, of course, is the common association of firearms with masculinity and allied values of power and independence. But gun cultures can be much more varied and nuanced: in another article, Hultin describes two different gun cultures in the Gambia, one centered on freedom from government interference and the other on the respect for a hunter’s skill and expertise [33]. Whatever the details, research must attend to the attitudes and values that encourage or discourage gun ownership and use.

6. Regulating and preventing gun violence

Almost everyone (except for a few radicals who believe that injuries and deaths are the price a society has to pay for gun rights) desires not only to understand but also to reduce or curtail gun violence. In some cases, this can be achieved through the cessation of war and other armed conflict. But for civilian non-conflict gun violence, many solutions have been offered, and their success depends on the myriad factors discussed above.

Countries and jurisdictions within them have enacted a variety of gun regulations and restrictions, some of which would be virtually unthinkable in the US. For instance, while there is, paradoxically, a lively gun culture in Switzerland (gun ownership and training are popular and commonplace), both gun sellers and owners are subject to strict rules. Not only permits but also records of who owns guns are required, and concealed-carry permits are rare. Furthermore, individuals who seek guns for self-protection must pass a test on loading, unloading, and firing the weapon, and anyone convicted of a crime or who “expresses a violent or dangerous attitude” is ineligible [19]. Likewise, after the nationally upsetting mass shooting at Port Arthur in 1996, Australia took strong action against guns. Almost immediately (and with a conservative government in office), Australia’s National Agreement on Firearms instituted mandatory licensing and registration, required applicants to demonstrate a “genuine need” for the weapon, banned nearly all automatic and semiautomatic “assault” rifles, and bought back roughly one-sixth of such rifles from the public [34]. Several countries in Latin America have adopted more-or-less strict gun laws, although others like Brazil under Bolsonaro attempted to liberalize gun access.

Governments have also taken regional and global action against guns, recognizing that gun availability and gun violence are not entirely local problems. The 2014 Arms Trade Treaty demanded that signatories obey clear rules on international arms sales and transfers; perhaps unsurprisingly, the US formally opted out of the treaty. Regionally, African leaders in 2013 adopted the “Silencing the Guns in Africa” initiative, followed by an “African Union Master Roadmap of Practicing Steps to Silence the Guns” in 2016. Since the goal has obviously not been reached, representatives renewed their pledge to extend the program to 2030.

Meanwhile, on the national or local level, many other solutions have been proposed or enacted. Among them are:

• better mental health intervention, on the assumption that gun violence is caused by mental illness (an individualization of a societal problem)

• prohibiting certain kinds of firearms or accessories like high-capacity magazines and “bump stocks” that convert guns into semiautomatic weapons

• waiting periods and age minimums to purchase firearms, along with background checks on buyers

• “red flag laws” to enable authorities to confiscate guns from people deemed to be an immediate threat

• gun buyback programs like the one in Australia

• placing metal detectors and armed guards in schools (which would potentially make schools safer, but not other public spaces)

• arming and training teachers so that they can defend their students against shooters (a responsibility many teachers prefer not to accept and which does nothing to address shootings in other venues).

Ultimately, many of these policies are unachievable in certain national and political climates, and their effectiveness is still a subject of hot debate.

7. Conclusion

This brief introduction sets the terms and the research agenda for academic investigation and informed public decision-making about guns and gun violence. Scholars must widen their lens to examine countries other than the United States and forms of firearm violence (lethal and nonlethal) beyond the high-profile mass shootings that plague that country. They must understand the specific local contexts and cultural meanings of gun ownership and use, and they must consider fully all of the causes and correlations of gun violence at work at multiple levels—local, national, regional, and global. The chapters in this volume aim to contribute to this project and to offer realistic assessments of the challenges and opportunities for minimizing the ravage of individuals, families, communities, and countries by gun violence.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.