There are some things regarding gun legislation and such that would be of help, and some things that would not. Universal background checks and universal mandatory safety training (there is no federal law requiring either of these, and half the states do not require them either) would be examples of helpful gun legislation. Stuff like gun buy-back programs and gun-free zones would be useless. Anything involving the nebulous term "assault rifle" is going to generate endless arguments on semantics.
To get to a few statistics:
People often focus on rifles when talking about America's gun problem, but handguns are what, by far, kill more people in the US. Firearms account for the majority of homicides here, and consistently the majority of those are via handguns. (
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One statistic that gun lobbyists like to bring up is that "gun violence peaked in the early 1990's",
and this is true (go to the "By Type" graph, look at the dark pink line), but it's also a terribly superficial take done to make it seem like there's not a problem or that the problem is on its way out. This doesn't change the fact that people have died that shouldn't be dead, nor that gun-related homicides (and homicides in general) have been increasing over the past several years and are at their highest point in the last ten. This country really does have a problem.
The thing is though, it's going to take more than just gun laws to put an end to the US's gun violence problem, even though the country has desperately needed certain pieces of legislation passed for a long time. Or at the very least, why settle for just what you can do with gun legislation alone? Laws will never completely remove the ability for people to own and use a gun, and so you have to address why people commit these shootings in the first place. Doesn't really matter if they happen less frequently and/or if less people die on average, people are still dying that didn't have to. It's a bit of a harder part of the problem to handle though, since a lot of it ends up stemming from mental health (in a population with likely rapidly declining mental health in a nation with a shitty healthcare system), and the US's culture regarding guns.
And this is all regarding just homicides too.
But really nothing will ever be done about the problem here. A lot of Americans view the Constitution as holy, second only to whatever religious text they follow, and the first 10 amendments to be the most important of its amendments. Many see the 2nd Amendment as a sacred shield to hide behind that means "no gun laws ever, gun laws bad", despite a
Supreme Court case in 2008 that struck down a DC handgun law also stating that the 2nd Amendment "is not absolute" (the link is a summary of the case and directly links to the 157 page SCOTUS document). And it's all so "the people can stand up against a tyrannical government like the founding fathers did", yet despite the fact that we're being oppressed right now and the world was set on its shitty path before I was even born (and I'm nearly 30), the best they can do is a failed takeover of the Capitol building in order to replace one shitty president with another over the ridiculous lie that the election was stolen.
And beyond that....if
20 little kids and their teachers getting murdered in broad daylight didn't spur this country to do literally anything, what possibly could? That should've been the watershed moment, yet it's been 9 years already, and the US has had other mass shootings both before and after too that could've been the catalyst, but weren't.
