The modern history of the United States is written in the shadow of mass shootings. It has become part of American identity, a recurring, dark rhythm marked by massacres in schools, churches, nightclubs, festivals, university campuses, shopping malls, and even hospitals. Gun violence is an everyday reality that is nearly impossible to explain from the outside and which those on the inside refuse to change. According to American press reports, as the end of 2025 approaches, the Gun Violence Archive has recorded more than 420 mass shootings this year, with roughly 390 dead and nearly 1,800 injured.
By definition, a mass shooting is an event in which at least four people are shot at once, not including the perpetrator. The trend is stable and the pattern is repetitive: in the United States, there is practically one mass shooting every single day. A press conversation was held by American Community Media about the prospects of confronting mass gun violence, with the participation of Dr. Ragy Girgis, director of the Columbia University Center for Prevention and Evaluation (COPE), Sarah Lerner, co-founder of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, and Dr. Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health at Johns Hopkins University. The picture they described is neither bright nor hopeful.
The motivations, demographic backgrounds, and profiles of the perpetrators are diverse, yet common traits emerge. Most offenders are men between the ages of 18 and 49, many with prior histories of domestic violence, mental illness, or social isolation. American criminological research has long warned that violence against women is often a precursor to later mass shootings. Many perpetrators feel overwhelmed by anger, rejection, or resentment, combined with a culture in which a gun is not merely a tool but a part of identity. In far-right, nationalist, and masculine-strength cultures, expressing oneself through a gun often represents social status or a “solution” to frustration.
The circle of victims is unpredictable and socially devastating. Schoolchildren, teachers, people attending worship, families shopping, university students, small children at birthday parties. Every age group and every social layer is affected, said Ragy Girgis. According to CDC data, more than 48,000 Americans die each year due to firearms, including suicides, homicides, and accidents. Among children and teenagers, firearms are now the leading cause of death, surpassing traffic accidents. This is a statistic that does not exist in any other developed country.
If the situation itself is tragic, the real reason behind it is even more so: despite facts, data, and public need, the United States is incapable of taking any meaningful federal action to restrict guns. The reason is not “freedom” or some romantic defense of the Second Amendment, but the paralysis of the political system and the deep financial and ideological entanglement between the NRA, the Republican political leadership, and the gun lobby, explained Girgis.
The position of the Republican Party has radicalized over the past decade: today it not only rejects any form of gun control, but actively promotes the ideology that “more guns mean less crime.” In other words, safety increases when there are more guns. They do not want to disarm shooters, they want to equip schools. This thought can be summarized simply: guns do not kill, people do. Yet reality shows that where there are fewer guns, there are fewer killings. Japan, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all have stricter gun laws, and in these countries mass shootings are virtually unknown or extremely rare.
Everything related to gun regulation in America has become a matter of identity and ideology. Republican politicians fear that if they make even the smallest compromise, their voters will consider them “traitors.” The structure of the federal system is also an obstacle: in the Senate, smaller, typically rural and conservative states have oversized political power and block national consensus. Federal legislation has repeatedly attempted to expand background checks, ban military-style weapons, or raise the purchase age, but these efforts have consistently failed. The barrier is not intellectual but financial: the NRA and affiliated lobbying organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on electoral influence.
The picture, however, is not entirely hopeless, because the American system allows for creative solutions at the state level. New York’s “Red Flag” law allows firearms to be temporarily taken away by court order from someone who can be shown to be a danger to others or to themselves, explained Sarah Lerner. In Baltimore, violence-prevention programs, youth-protection centers, and community mediation have reduced the rate of gun homicides. In New York City, a strict licensing system operates, which research shows correlates with lower shooting rates compared to southern states. In Illinois, in the capital, Chicago, which is otherwise heavily affected by gun violence, local initiatives attempt to restrict gun-trafficking routes through which weapons arrive mainly from states with weak regulations.
America’s gun problem cannot be solved solely at the local level, because guns migrate on a borderless national market. A military-style rifle purchased in Arkansas or Texas can find its way to Chicago or New York within days. Therefore, local successes are only temporary, uncertain, and partial, because there is no nationwide, unified framework behind them. The question is not whether the United States could produce fewer mass massacres. The answer has long been known: yes. There was an antisemitic mass massacre in Australia recently, but it has already led to new gun restrictions.
In Australia, after a single mass killing, a strict state-run gun-buyback system was introduced, and similar tragedies virtually disappeared for a long time. The most recent mass murder was carried out for ideological reasons, with antisemitic motives, by people who have held hunting permits and guns for 15 years. But in response to the Hanukkah massacre, previously issued hunting permits will be reviewed and terminated, and hunters will no longer receive lifetime permits. From now on, backgrounds and permits will be reviewed annually in case something may have changed in the lives of hunters.
In America, however, the political system does not view mass shootings as a national crisis but as an unavoidable “collateral factor” on the misunderstood altar of freedom. Some equate freedom with the freedom to own guns. The United States is not failing to change because it does not know the solutions, but because the gun has become part of its identity. What must change first is not a law but a cultural premise: the myth that human life can be subordinated to the free possession of firearms.
Until that changes, every school, every church, every arena, and every street in America is a potential shooting site. The most shocking of all is that even the deaths of the greatest ideologues and supporters of gun ownership have not shaken this worldview. There are Republican influencers whose deaths themselves became “collateral damage” through their own ideology.
