We live in an era when “facts” are disassembled, reconfigured—or worse, fabricated out of thin air—before being sown like toxic seeds into public discourse. So deployed, they are driving emotions and confirming prejudices that increasingly make it harder for people to engage in informed public policymaking.
Nowhere are such crippling disconnects and misconceptions more dangerous than in the national discussion of firearm violence. Other societies, grounded in common-good sensibilities inculcated at least partly by church teaching and tradition, responded to firearm massacres with rapid legislation to regulate or shut down firearm markets. An inability to grasp the true level and location of firearm injury and death contributes to a complex of bad policymaking. As the Trump administration throttles research and public messaging on gun violence, effective policymaking will become still harder.
The Gun Violence Archive recorded 503 mass shootings in 2024, a level of gun violence unimaginable in every other advanced economy in the world. But in the public imagination, part of a mythology promulgated by gun manufacturers and their servants at the National Rifle Association, guns keep America safe. The answer to gun violence is—what else?—more guns.
A 2023 survey found that 72 percent of gun owners cite personal protection as a major reason for gun ownership. But when you drill down to the real numbers, you discover the opposite is true: Guns don’t make you and your family safer. Instead, they make it more likely that you or a family member will suffer a firearm-related injury or death.
Because of comparably tough gun laws in Illinois, gun rights absolutists love to focus on the firearm mayhem in Chicago. Indeed, according to The Trace, a digital think tank tracking firearm injuries and deaths, Illinois scores at the top of U.S. states in terms of gun violence. But a giant contributing factor to Illinois’ gun woes can be located just across the border in Indiana, where a wide-open firearms market keeps the flow of weapons into Chicago a constant threat.
Joining Illinois at the top of The Trace’s tally board of injury and death, however, are states you may not expect. Illinois lands behind Louisiana and just ahead of Mississippi and Alabama in gun deaths and injuries between 2014 and 2023. Despite the national focus on big cities such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, often depicted in right-wing rhetoric as Mad Max-ian dystopias, the highest rates of per-capita gun injuries and deaths are being experienced far from the headlines in much smaller communities; 13 of the 20 towns and cities with the highest rates of shootings are located in the South.
What’s at the heart of this epidemic of gun violence? While gun advocates point to failures in mental health care or blame absentee parenting and video game addiction, these researchers conclude the greatest contributing factor to increasing firearm violence is the ongoing lowering of standards for firearm ownership and carrying.
More guns mean more gun violence. It should not be that hard to understand. When guns are in the home, domestic violence with a gun is more likely, and suicides and accidental death and injury rates are higher. Firearms are now the leading cause of death for children in the United States, and they are the weapons used most often in domestic violence against women. The U.S. child firearm mortality rate more than doubled from a low of 1.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2013 to 3.7 in 2021.
If you purchase a weapon because of a threat you perceive lurking outside your home, you may have simply delivered a far more likely source of harm into your life. If you truly want to protect yourself and your family, revisit the real-world statistics and act accordingly, not out of fear stoked by cable or digital news.
This article also appears in the April 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 4, page 42). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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