Can other countries help us understand America’s mass shooting phenomena?
PRI’s The World
When Devin Kelley entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5 and shot and killed 26 people, it became the 308th mass shooting of 2017 in the United States. It came four weeks after the Las Vegas shooting, when Stephen Paddock killed 59 people from a 32nd-floor hotel room above an open-air country music concert.
Since the Sutherland Springs shooting, there have been more than 10 mass shooting events, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks incidents in which four or more people are shot. The bleak totals for 2017 in mass shootings in America: at least 415 killed and more than 1,700 wounded.
Both events have reignited America’s gun debate. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats reintroduced an updated assault weapons ban, but no Republicans have supported the measure.
America leads world in gun ownership
The U.S. doesn’t require gun owners to register guns the way many other countries do, so researchers have to estimate ownership. A 2013 study estimates between 262 million and 310 million guns of various kinds are in the United States — which calculates to roughly 101 guns per 100 people.
It’s the high rate of gun ownership, said University of Alabama criminology professor Adam Lankford, that is directly correlated with America’s mass shooting problem.
“It’s not that we have higher homicide rates,” Mr. Lankford said. “It’s not about wealth. It’s not about urbanization. It’s not about suicide rates. The difference between us and other countries that explains why we have more of these attacks was firearm ownership rate. We have almost double the firearm ownership rate of any other country.”
Mr. Lankford studied 171 countries and tallied up mass shootings across the globe from 1966 to 2012. Of the 272 events he found, 31 percent occurred in the U.S., although the U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population.
“Purely in terms of numbers, we have more than 200 million more guns than the next highest country, which is India,” Mr. Lankford said. “And India has a much greater population than ours, so purely in terms of the number of guns, which is really the product of American gun culture, really, there’s no comparison between us and anywhere else.”
El Salvador: Guns fuel world’s top homicide rate
Susan Cruz was 6 years old the first time her mother taught her how to shoot a gun.
“Feeling both that shock and that amazement and that adrenaline, that power of something — that didn’t look like much of something to me at the age of 6,” Ms. Cruz remembered. “I still remember the feeling of the gun going off and then going to the cinderblock wall and seeing where the bullets lodged.”
She grew up in El Salvador but fled at age 8 when civil war broke out. That first lesson was only an introduction to a life surrounded by guns. After moving to Los Angeles, Ms. Cruz joined a gang as a teenager and lost friends to gun violence.
She moved back to her home country in 1993, but gang violence followed as the U.S. began deporting gang members back to El Salvador. El Salvador had the highest homicide rate in the world in 2015, according to the most recent United Nations data, with 108.6 killings per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras was second, with 64 per 100,000.
“On any given day in El Salvador, there’s an average of at least 12 homicides per day,” Ms. Cruz said. “That’s a dozen people being murdered.”
Ms. Cruz now lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her family and is the founder of Sin Fronteras, an organization dedicated to helping troubled youth on both sides of U.S.-Mexico border. After a lifetime surrounded by guns, she said she feels more anxious with them around, but not everyone agrees.
“I have friends and family who will argue with me that they need this gun to stay safe,” Ms. Cruz said. “The ethos of ‘good guy with a gun will prevent a mass shooting, good guy with a gun will make sure the family’s protected’ — it is a very prevalent mentality and I think it has a lot to do with the infusion of a military culture.”
Ms. Cruz said gang members think in similar ways as well: They want to be armed to protect themselves against others, a “kill or be killed” world view.
“When you have an entire country that thinks that way, it’s no wonder countries like El Salvador have the highest per capita homicide rates in the world,” she said.
Yemen: Half of U.S. gun ownership rate
Yemen ranks No. 2 in the world in gun ownership, with an estimated 55 guns per 100 people, according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey, the best count of global gun ownership in countries where people are not required to register firearms.
Yemen’s gun culture is visible in the streets, in the open-air markets, or souks, said reporter Tik Root, who lived in Yemen before civil war broke out in 2015.
But the mass shootings in Yemen — Mr. Lankford counted 11 in his study — are different from those in the U.S.
“The shootings that happen seem to have more relation to either tribal conflict or an ongoing dispute with something,” Mr. Root said. “The shootings that I heard about or saw in Yemen usually had maybe more of an explanation than they do in the U.S. You didn’t hear the mental health argument as much as usually a clear reason why somebody had used their gun.”
Norway: Struggling to understand shooter
Bjørn Ihler was 20 when Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb in Oslo in 2011 and then, dressed as a police officer and showing false identification, took a ferry to the island of Utøya and opened fire on Norway’s Labor Party youth summer camp.
“He started shooting at our group and the kids and I jumped in the water,” Mr. Ihler recalled. “I kind of swam straight outwards and sank, so I dodged his bullets somehow.”
Breivik shot 68 people that day, over the course of more than 90 minutes, before police arrived.
“I stood up again in the water, I looked back to the marshland,” Mr. Ihler said. “I saw Breivik take aim at me.”
Breivik, who ultimately killed 77 people that day, was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison, Norway’s maximum penalty. On the day of the attack, he published a manifesto that lays out a far-right, anti-Islam, anti-feminist worldview.
Since then, Mr. Ihler has sought to understand political extremism and claims he has met with more reformed extremists than anyone else in the world.
“It was really difficult to deal with the fact that someone coming out of my community wanted to kill me for essentially being me,” Mr. Ihler said. “That’s kind of why I started … going around traveling to meet with former extremists and learn their path into extremism.”
In U.S., ‘coming to be a normal thing now’
The deadly attack at Sutherland Springs’ First Baptist Church was the 14th fatal shooting at a house of worship since 2012, according to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which tracks gun violence.
“It’s only gotten worse as the power of the [National Rifle Association] and the gun industry has grown and is holding Congress hostage,” Rabbi Jonah Pesner said.
Along with representatives from 50 religious organizations, Rabbi Pesner signed a letter calling on U.S. lawmakers to take tougher action on gun control.
“Enough is enough with empty thoughts and prayers that are not followed by action,” the rabbi said. “As a Jew, I believe that every prayer is a call to action.”
And he is reassured by polling that shows broad support from American voters for what he calls common sense gun regulations.
“Evangelicals tend to see it differently,” said Joe Carter, editor at The Gospel Coalition, a network of evangelical churches founded in 2005.
“One reason is regional,” Mr. Carter said. “A lot of evangelicals are from the South. A lot of them served in the military. A lot of them are more familiar with guns than the average American, and they own more guns than the average American.”
“I mean, if you’re going to shoot up a church, you’re not going to worry about a gun control law,” said Mr. Carter, who also is a vet and a gun owner.
Gun ownership is not the solution in all cases, Mr. Carter said. But a good guy with a gun can prevent somebody who is armed and prepared to do innocents harm, he said.
Mr. Carter said many of the mass shootings at U.S. churches or elsewhere are the result of domestic violence, which is something religious leaders need to take more seriously.
“That’s the problem with the gun control issue,” Mr. Carter said. “That’s always the go-to thing. And it drowns out other conversations we should be having.”
The recent shooting at the Texas church brought back horrific memories for people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, where a white supremacist fatally shot six people in 2012.
“It’s coming to be a normal thing now,” temple spokeswoman Nirmal KaurSingh said. “It can happen anywhere.”
Asked if she thinks that more guns in more people’s hands might be good for safety and security at places of worship, Ms. Kaur-Singh said, “I don’t know.”
“But I don’t like guns.”