America, armed and dangerous.
There are now some 40 million handguns in this country.
Firearm injuries represent an epidemic in the United States.
--an epidemic of gun violence.
Join us in this campaign to reduce gun violence.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun--
Another mass shooting in America.
--is a good guy with a gun.
316 people are shot every single day.
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REPORTER: Gun violence-- a topic that's
deeply divisive in America, a country
where guns are embedded in everyday life.
As of 2018, it was estimated that there
were approximately 400 million civilian-owned guns in America.
That means there are more guns than there
are people or cars in the US.
By comparison, Americans own more guns per capita
than any other country, accounting for about 40%
of the world's total gun ownership.
And that number is likely to increase.
Since 2008, the US firearm industry's worth
grew 232%, making it a $63.5 billion industry in 2020.
But the reason for division over gun ownership
isn't just because the US owns the most guns.
It's because it also has the highest rate of mass shootings,
gun-related homicides, and firearm
suicides among similarly developed nations.
Our politics is just not being incentivized
to pay attention to the things that would
actually reduce gun violence.
This is the job of public health--
to help the most vulnerable, to stand up for them.
REPORTER: So how did we get here?
How has the right to own a gun become
a divisive American ideal?
And of all the proposed solutions, what do experts say
could effectively reduce gun violence in the US?
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Around the 19th century, there were at least nine
countries that had the right to bear
arms in their constitution.
But as years passed, most of these countries
made changes revoking or limiting gun rights.
As of 2021, only three countries cite the right
to bear arms in their constitution,
and the United States is one of them.
The Second Amendment activism was not at the center
of early gun culture.
And for a long time, most people in the US owned guns,
but it was really for hunting, target shooting.
It was associated with masculinity,
so it was kind of a rite of passage.
But it was not about rights and the law.
REPORTER: The idea of gun control
didn't really enter the National conversation
until 1934 following a mass shooting in Chicago.
Most gun regulation laws were passed without much opposition
until 1968 when President Lyndon B. Johnson
signed the Gun Control Act.
But this started to change years later
when the NRA became an advocacy organization centered
on the Second Amendment, bringing
with it a huge influx of money.
It really changed after the Cincinnati revolt in 1977
when there was a coup inside of the NRA.
Second Amendment activists took the NRA over.
And then in the 2000s, it switched
again to being a mostly Republican gun
lobbying organization.
REPORTER: Nowadays, the NRA spends between $2 to $5 million
annually lobbying for gun rights.
And during the 2020 elections alone,
the Association spent $29 million in political campaigns.
And we believe in freedom and liberty and the right
to keep and bear arms.
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REPORTER: In 1983, the CDC really started
looking at gun violence as a public health
problem when they created the Violence Epidemiology Branch.
The NRA looked at this, and they said,
if you do this research, it's going to end up
in everyone losing their guns.
It's either the research or your guns.
You can't have both.
You've got to decide.
This was misinformation, but it was a powerful strategy
for the NRA.
REPORTER: Eventually, Congress deferred
funding for gun violence research
by passing the Dickey Amendment in 1996, which prohibited
the CDC from using federal funding to advocate
or promote gun control.
After its implementation, the CDC spent more than 20 years
without the resources to conduct significant research
on gun violence.
It was a threat.
It was a shot across the bow.
That had big impacts, particularly in the field
of data collection.
If you're getting your data collection done
by a private foundation or some other source,
you don't have what researchers have described
to me as the full faith and credit of the US government
behind it.
That makes it easier if you have that full faith and credit
to get agencies and get states on board
and get that data collected.
REPORTER: The need for research was finally recognized shortly
after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida
that left 17 dead in 2018.
A clarification was made to the Dickey Amendment
allowing the CDC to conduct research
on the causes of gun violence.
This research is going to find those ways that we can keep
guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have
them without infringing on the rights
of those people who should.
REPORTER: But in order to understand
how we can potentially reduce gun violence,
let's first dive into the numbers around it.
Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in America
from firearm injuries.
The US saw the peak of gun ownership in 1993
with an estimated 51% of households owning a gun.
That same year, gun homicides also reached its peak.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When you have easy access to guns
and you have lots of guns available to you,
more problems look like problems that can get solved with them.
There very much is a correlation between the number
of guns in a place and the number
of gun deaths in a place.
And that's something that you can
see consistently across the board, year after year.
The places that have more guns have more gun deaths.
But if you look at just the injuries and deaths,
you're missing a very big part of the problem.
For every individual life that's destroyed,
there's a family that's destroyed.
There's a community that's shattered.
The cost of anxiety, of fear and worry, is tremendous.
REPORTER: And while most gun owners
cite safety and protection as their reason
for owning a firearm, research shows
that having a gun in your home doesn't
necessarily keep you safer.
What we found was that not only does having
a gun in your home not make you safer,
but it increases the risk that someone in your family
will be killed by a gun, will be a victim of gun homicide.
And it increases it hugely--
not by 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, not by 100%, by 200%.
The risk that someone in your family
will be shot and killed with a gun triples.
And the risk that someone in your family
will commit suicide with a gun goes up 400%.
It's multiplied five-fold.
REPORTER: And suicides make up the largest
portion of firearm deaths.
Two thirds of all gun deaths in America are suicides.
And most of the people that are killing
themselves with guns in the US are older
white men who are gun owners.
Then you have another one third that are homicides.
When you're talking about the homicides,
you're predominantly talking about younger Black men.
And when you talk about women being killed in homicides,
you're predominantly talking about domestic violence.
REPORTER: When we shift to mass shootings,
they only account for a small percentage of gun deaths
each year, but they've also become more common and more
deadly in recent years.
The politics of gun violence has, over the last couple
of decades, really centered around things
like mass shootings, terrorism, accidental gun deaths
in small children.
But if you actually go and look at the data,
again, what you find is that those
are not making up the majority of gun violence deaths.
They're not even making up a significant minority.
REPORTER: ABC News combined forces with the Gun Violence
Archive to document a week's worth of gun violence
and found that in a single week in July, 2021,
there were more than 1,000 incidents of gun
violence across 47 states.
That's about one every 10 minutes.
And in those incidents, more than 400 people were killed.
Despite the gap in federal research,
limited data shows that implementation
of certain gun regulations and laws
have been effective at a state level.
For example, in Indiana, the red flag law
has been associated with a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides
a decade after it was implemented.
Even other methods, like permit laws or ceasefire programs,
have had some success in individual cities.
But the research is mixed.
One study found that states can reduce homicide rates just
by implementing three laws.
Universal background checks are
laws that prevent anyone with a criminal record
from buying a weapon.
May issue laws give discretion to the police
to actually refuse to issue a concealed carry permit.
Valid misdemeanor laws basically prevent someone
who has been convicted of an interpersonal violence
misdemeanor from buying a gun.
We found that a combination of all three laws
reduce firearm homicide rates by 29%.
In 2019, it means that 4,200 people would have been saved.
REPORTER: But none of these methods on their own
are perfect.
And as some states loosen the reins on gun regulation,
expanding the research on gun violence
could be our most useful tool in reducing it.
Having more consistent data and more
long-term sets of data, those things really
can help us find solutions.
Most gun owners actually support
gun violence prevention laws.
Over 90% of gun owners support universal background checks.
They overwhelmingly support violence misdemeanor
laws, red flag laws.
And really, what's interesting is that they
don't know that others do.
They are influenced by hearing the vocal minority
all the time.
We can find ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who
shouldn't have them without infringing on the rights
of law-abiding gun owners.
And that gives us so many ways forward.
If we work on it together, if we use the science,
and if we focus on prevention, this is a problem we can solve.
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