Gun Violence in America - Stop The Insanity…Please! - Sep 19, 2025

I’ve been planning to write about gun violence in America for some time now.  The idea  came about a few weeks ago when I heard the tragic news of the August 27th mass shooting at a catholic school in Minneapolis. In that attack two children were killed and 21 others were injured, while they were attending a prayer service at the school.  What could be more heart-breaking than children dying while they prayed! 

While the loved ones of those affected by the Minneapolis shooting were still grieving and processing that heinous crime, news broke of the assassination of right-wing extremist commentator, Charlie Kirk.  Unfortunately the killing of Kirk overshadowed the shooting in Minneapolis, rendering it a gun violence statistic. And, as if this wasn’t bad enough, while Charlie Kirk was being assassinated in Utah, a 16 year old student opened fire at his school in Evergreen, Colorado, critically injuring two of his fellow students, before turning his gun on himself and taking his own life. This event was the 47th school shooting in the United States this year.  Because of Charlie Kirk’s high profile assassination, the Evergreen, CO shooting barely made the news.  

It’s been nine days since Charlie Kirk was killed.  In those nine days, 1,125 other Americans died from gun violence. Fifty were children. 

One month before the mass shooting at the school in Minneapolis, the US administration cut funding for programs aimed at identifying potential mass shooters. The grants, which were part of $18.5 million in cuts at the US Homeland Security, funded programs at the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office to assess and manage mass violence threats. 

In what is becoming a regular recurrence, these repeated incidents of gun violence in the United States make me angry and have me wondering - what’s it going to take to make this stop?!  When are Americans going to have enough of these terrible acts, and do something about this ongoing violence?! These shootings—political and otherwise—happen too often, are far too common to explain away as anomalies, or the acts of extremists, or acts of minority groups. 

Nearly 46,700 Americans died from gun-related injuries in 2023. Most were suicides, but over 17,000 were homicides. Mass shootings have become so routine that one in 15 Americans has personally witnessed one. The U.S. Surgeon General recently declared gun violence a public health emergency, a designation usually reserved for pandemics and opioids. 

These numbers are staggering, so you would think this environment would lead to an atmosphere of anxiety, where every public gathering would carry the fear of what might happen if someone with a rifle, a grudge, and an open line of sight decides to act on their anger. But Americans see it daily, and it seems they’ve become desensitized to it. I recently attended some sporting events in the US Southwest. People were excited about attending the game, cheering on their teams, and there was no chatter about these recent incidents of gun violence; it was business as usual.  I witnessed this desensitization first-hand.

Charlie Kirk himself said that some mass gun violence is the price Americans must pay to maintain their right to bear arms.  “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” Kirk said during a Turning Point event in Salt Lake City in 2023, adding that gun deaths can be reduced but will never go away.

 How absurd is that!?  Is the right to bear arms that important?!  It isn’t that important to Canadians or the British; two of the societies that are most similar to America.

The US has more deaths from gun violence than any other developed country per capita. The rate in the US is eight times greater than in Canada, which has the seventh highest rate of gun ownership in the world; 22 times higher than in the European Union and 23 times greater than in Australia, according to Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) data from 2019. 

Less than two weeks after Australia’s worst mass shooting, the federal government implemented a new program, banning rapid-fire rifles and shotguns, and unifying gun owner licensing and registrations across the country. In the next 10 years gun deaths in Australia dropped by more than 50%.

In New Zealand, gun laws were swiftly amended after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Just 24 hours after the attack, in which 51 people were killed, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the law would change. New Zealand’s parliament voted almost unanimously to change the country’s gun laws less than a month later, banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons. 

There are zero confirmed mass shootings in Canada in 2025.  The data from 2024  identified 10 mass shootings with at least four victims in Canadian cities over the past decade, while another study counted 109 incidents with at least 3 victims.  

Irony & Tragedy

Charlie Kirk’s recent assassination was both tragic and ironic.

It’s tragic in that Charlie was only 31 years of age, a husband and a father to two young children. He didn’t deserve to die while voicing his opinions, as controversial as they may be, and depriving his family of his being, in the process.

It’s ironic that he died being shot by an assassin, while defending American’s rights to bear arms. He was exercising his first amendment rights while speaking about US citizens’ second amendment rights.  

Whether his killer was driven by ideology, grievance, or some darker instability, Kirk’s death forces Americans to face the reality that America is inundated by guns and grievance. For years, Kirk told audiences that the real threats to American safety came from immigrants crossing the border, from “woke” teachers in classrooms, from transgender people demanding recognition. He cast suspicion upon the vulnerable. Yet the violence that killed him came not from the communities he blamed for violence,  but from the same climate of fear, rage, and easy access to firearms that he helped cultivate. The irony is compelling. 

It is impossible to write about Charlie Kirk’s death without also writing about Charlie Kirk’s life. At thirty-one, he had already built himself into one of the most visible and polarizing figures on the American right. He founded Turning Point USA at eighteen, and over the next decade transformed it into a campus empire flush with donor cash and a pipeline into the conservative media. By 2019, TPUSA was reporting nearly 30 million dollars in annual revenue, and Kirk himself was drawing a six-figure salary. Between his podcast, his book deals, his speaking fees, and his Arizona estate, he was a millionaire many times over before he turned thirty. His fortune was not built on invention, art, or even policy. It was built on division, on turning marginalized groups into punching bags for applause lines and fundraising drives.

These Numbers Are Crazy, But They Don’t Lie:

• The United States is the only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people. There are 120 guns for every 100 Americans.

• SAS researchers estimate that Americans own 393 million of the 857 million civilian guns available, which is around 46% of the world’s civilian gun cache.

• Based on recent polling, approximately 40% of US adults live in a household with a gun, and roughly 32% personally own one.

• The US was home to 4% of the world’s population but accounted for 35% of global suicides by firearm in 2024.

• While personal safety tops the list of reasons why American gun owners say they own a firearm, 63% of US gun-related deaths are self-inflicted.

• Almost a third of US adults believe there would be less crime if more people owned guns, according to an April 2021 Pew survey. However, multiple studies show that where people have easy access to firearms, gun-related deaths tend to be more frequent, including by suicide, homicide and unintentional injuries.

Meanwhile in Canada, it is estimated that around 26% of households own at least one firearm. This equates to roughly three million Canadians who own firearms, with the majority of those being long guns. Long guns are used primary for recreational hunting. 

What’s The Answer To This Problem?

No single measure is a complete solution; any strategies deployed to deal with gun violence must address various factors contributing to the problem, including how easy it is to access firearms. The following steps should be taken to bring gun violence under control:

• Implementing universal background checks for all gun sales.

• Utilizing "Red flag" laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders) to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed a threat. These laws are linked to lower firearm suicide rates and have been used to prevent mass shooting threats.

• Requiring prospective gun buyers to obtain a license through firearm licensing laws, which are associated with lower rates of gun homicides and suicides.

• Enacting secure firearm storage laws to reduce unintentional shootings and suicides, particularly among young people.

• Expanding domestic violence restrictions to prohibit gun access for individuals with a history of domestic violence, reducing intimate partner homicides.

• Regulating high-risk weapons, such as assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, to reduce the lethality of mass shootings. 

Some lawmakers in America have tried to implement common sense gun laws, but others have defeated those efforts.  Why?  The resisting lawmakers are funded by weapons manufacturers or are financially supported by citizens who refuse any impediment to their right to bear arms. Some of the recent attempts to implement common sense guns laws include:

• Assault weapons ban: In December 2023, an attempt was made to pass the "Assault Weapons Ban of 2023" by unanimous consent. Senator John Barrasso blocked the request.

• Universal background checks: Alongside the assault weapons ban, a proposal for universal background checks failed to pass in December 2023. Stricter background check proposals have also repeatedly failed over the last decade, most notably after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2013.

• Domestic terrorism bill: In May 2022, Senate Republicans blocked debate on a domestic terrorism bill that would have opened up a path for broader gun policy discussions. 

What is needed is  a change in attitude within society on this perceived need to have a gun. I have many American friends and acquaintances who are gun-owners. They share their “thoughts and prayers” when they hear about incidents of gun violence, but they don’t think twice about being a gun-owner, or brandishing their hand gun to confront a stranger on their property.  In contrast I don’t know of any Canadian family members or friends who keep hand guns in their homes. And they would never consider approaching a stranger on their property with a gun in their hand.  Canadians just don’t think this way.  I know of a few Canadians who enjoy hunting and own rifles for this purpose.  But these weapons are always kept under lock and key, and are only removed from their secure locations for hunting trips.  And by the way, they have a permit in order to own these hunting rifles and must obtain another permit before engaging in a hunting trip.  In other words, it’s harder to access guns in Canada and harder to use them.  

I found this quote, published today from author Scott Galloway, in his weekly newsletter, “No Mercy/No Malice”  - “The U.K., where I’ve been living for the past three years, has much in common with the U.S. The problems are familiar: racial division, arguments over immigration, declining opportunity for young people. Yet one difference stands out. It will take more than a year for the U.K. to see as many gun deaths (per capita) as the U.S. experienced in the nine days since Kirk’s murder. Private handguns are outlawed here, and hunting firearms are tightly controlled.” 

Sidenote - subscribe to Scott Galloway’s newsletter, it’s fantastic!

Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting and spending time in America. I enjoy California, New York City, and have a particular fondness for Scottsdale, Arizona.  In fact, Scottsdale has become a home away from home for us, especially during the Ottawa winter months. While I have visited the United States many times for business and pleasure, I am fortunate not to have had a gun encounter.  Of course, now that I mention it I may be jinxing myself.  

When it comes to gun violence I’m glad to be Canadian and live in Canada, and am glad not to have dealt with guns in the United States, thus far.   

The problem of gun violence is staring us in the face. So is the solution. Let’s do something about it!!