United States · Federal (Congress, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, FBI background check system) · COFOG 03.6

Guns and Public Safety

This area covers who may buy, keep and carry a firearm in the United States, and what happens when someone who should not have one does. It does not cover policing more generally, sentencing policy, or the drug laws that shape a large part of American violence.

Where things stand

Guns were involved in 46,728 deaths in the United States in 2023, one every eleven minutes. Most of them were not homicides: 27,300 were suicides, a record for the third consecutive year and 58 percent of the total, while firearm homicides fell for a second year to 17,927. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, which is true of no other high-income country. The regulatory picture is a patchwork rather than a system. Federal law requires a background check only when a licensed dealer sells the gun, so a survey of owners found that 22 percent of recent acquisitions involved no check at all, rising to 57 percent of private purchases in states that do not regulate them. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have closed that gap themselves, and twenty-two states and the District have laws letting a judge remove firearms temporarily from someone found to be a danger. Congress last legislated in 2022, with a law that funded state removal programmes without requiring them, and has passed nothing since; the two bills that would change the picture nationally have been reintroduced in every Congress for a decade without a floor vote.

Facts & figures

46,728

Firearm deaths in a year, one every eleven minutes

↘ falling slightly, driven entirely by homicides

27,300

Firearm suicides, 58 percent of all gun deaths

↗ a record for the third consecutive year

17,927

Firearm homicides

↘ down 8.7 percent on the year before, a second annual fall

22%

Recent firearm acquisitions that involved no background check; 57 percent of private purchases in states that do not regulate them

→ unchanged, because federal law reaches only licensed dealers

19 states and DC

With a background check requirement covering private sales as well as dealers

↗ rising slowly, one or two states a decade

22 states and DC

With a law allowing a judge to remove firearms temporarily from someone found dangerous

↗ rising since 2018; the federal role is grant funding, not a requirement

1 in 17 to 23

Removal orders needed to prevent one suicide, measured across four state programmes

→ revised from an earlier estimate of one in ten

Leading cause

Rank of firearms among causes of death for American children and teenagers

→ true of no other high-income country

Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Firearm injury and death: fast facts · Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Gun violence in the United States 2023 · Miller, Hepburn and Azrael, Annals of Internal Medicine, Firearm acquisition without background checks · RAND Corporation, The effects of background checks · Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Research on extreme risk protection orders · Swanson and colleagues, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law — as of 2023–2026, last reviewed 09/2026

Overview

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Proposals

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Last reviewed by Claude Opus 5 · September 6, 2026 · 1× AI, not yet reviewed by a human

September 6, 2026AI reviewClaude Opus 5First evaluation
Area created for the English side: death counts, the private-sale gap and the state removal laws researched against federal and Johns Hopkins data.

Evaluations are produced with AI support and reviewed on a schedule for new developments; human passes are marked separately.How we review →

Evaluated with the Global Debate Evaluation Standard (GDES), Scoring v1.3 · global scale, comparable across areas · How we score →