According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2021, 40,726 people died by guns in the United States. Since 2014, 36,000 people have died in this way every year: every ten years, the equivalent of the city of Laval’s population disappears in our neighbor to the south. This year, the homicide rate has reached record highs since the mid-1990s.
However, the endemic violence in American society is directly linked to the proliferation of weapons – which research confirms. Furthermore, Sripal Bangalore and Franz H. Messerli have established in theAmerican Journal of Medicine that the rate of gun ownership is a strong predictor of the rate of gun-related deaths. Even more, explains criminologist Franklin Zimring, this availability makes crime more lethal than elsewhere in the West.
This is all the more worrying, according to Garen J. Wintemute (in Injury Epidemiology, 2021), that background checks on firearms buyers between January 2020 and September 2021 exceed expectations by 60%. All the more so, he adds, since this measure underestimates purchases since it takes into account neither multiple acquisitions during a transaction nor sales between individuals. However, the last estimate of the number of weapons in circulation in the United States by the Small Arms Survey dates from 2018: it then estimated the number of weapons in circulation among the civilian population in the United States at 393.3 million – 120 , 5 weapons per 100 inhabitants. The Pew Research Center estimates that by 2021, four in ten adults live in households with a firearm, while a third of Americans own one. This must be seen in the context where, as explained by the professor and associate member of the Observatory on the United States of the Raoul-Dandurand Francis Langlois Chair, the discourse surrounding the possession and use of weapons has changed profoundly. since the early 1980s: the possession of firearms is no longer linked to sport shooting or hunting, but they have become a real object of identity and a means of affirming one’s individuality.
In addition, the recent period is special in more than one way. For example, sociology professor at Northland College Angela Stroud notes three significant increases in the last five years in the United States: an increase in the number of people killed or injured by firearms; increase in the number of killings; and an increase in the number of protests involving heavily armed civilian citizens, the majority of whom are white men. She explains how this increasingly violent society comes in a sophisticated way to legitimize the use and carrying of firearms.
Therefore, the proliferation of weapons in cities, and especially around and in schools, represents a substantial problem that state and local institutions manage very differently. On the one hand, for example, the Newburgh School District in New York State offers the possibility of distance education following a series of gun-related incidents. On the other hand, a bill (HB99) has just been passed by the Ohio lower house and is moving towards that state’s upper house to allow teachers (with minimalist training) to bring weapons to class. – a measure which is presented as a gain for rural schools which do not have the means to hire security guards, but as an increased risk of slippage for its opponents. As the Supreme Court prepares – in the case New York State Rifle Pistol Association c. Bruen – to reduce control over weapons, the stakes are real. They are all the more so since the disparate laws create a domino effect, where the crossing of a border from one State to another makes it possible to circumvent restrictive measures.
This problem that plagues the United States from within (the Washington post speaks of “the other epidemic”) also has a contagion effect beyond the country’s borders.
Indeed, for several decades, Mexico has been at the forefront. According to a report by the Mexican government’s Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) last December, nearly 3 million guns have been illegally imported from the United States. And according to the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), 70% of weapons linked to crime scenes in Mexico come from the United States. An investigation by Washington post makes the link between the 50 caliber weapons used by the American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and their use in recent times by the cartels in Mexico against police helicopters, police stations … sometimes a few days after that they were acquired in Texas or Arizona. These weapons then make their way, following the drug trafficking routes in the opposite direction, to Central America, where they help fuel violence and throw thousands of migrants into an endless spiral. Similarly, over the past five years, the ATF has determined, at Ottawa’s request, the provenance of weapons used in Canada: of these, 20,806 originated in the United States.
On the one hand, there is no US federal law that penalizes arms trafficking in the United States. On the other hand, the forgotten player in this equation, in the words of the Center for American Progress, is the arms industry. Concentrated in the hands of a few companies, its accountability is minimal, especially since the agency that is supposed to control them (ATF) has limited powers and the previous government helped, according to the Arms Control Association, to alleviate the constraints on the export of small arms. Even if the current situation in Quebec cannot be reduced to the only American dimension, the impact of the latter is not negligible.