What's Behind America’s Deadly Gun Culture?

The U.S. makes up less than 5% of the world’s population yet owns nearly half of all civilian guns globally.

Transcript

00:00It's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have

00:05the second amendment to protect our other god-given rights.

00:09While the U.S. is home to less than 5% of world's population,

00:12Americans own more than 45% of all civilian-owned guns on the planet.

00:16After Charlie Kirk was killed by a single sniper shot put the neck in Utah,

00:19America's obsession with guns once again came to the fore.

00:22According to a 2023 U.S. Centers for Disease Control report,

00:2546,728 gun-related deaths were reported in the U.S. in 2023.

00:30To put it simply, 128 gun deaths every day, amounting to one death every 11 minutes.

00:35According to a 2022 Everytown research and policy report,

00:38the gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 4.38.

00:40It is 26 times more than any other high-income country.

00:43The right to bear firearms is protected by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,

00:47which makes buying a gun in the U.S. straightforward for people who meet federal and state requirements.

00:52A growing body of historical and sociological research suggests

00:55that America's gun culture is closely tied to its history of racism,

00:58where firearms were used as tools to control enslaved people.

01:02Historians argue that the nation's modern obsession with guns

01:04has its roots in these earlier practices.

01:07In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban,

01:11ruling that the right to bear firearms for self-defense is an individual's right.

01:15Yet even prominent advocates of loser gun laws, such as Charlie Kirk,

01:18have themselves fallen victim to the lethal risks that firearms can pose.