Five shocking charts that reveal the huge problem America has with guns

Firearms now kill more American children than car crashes and cancer combined, with the country’s gun sales on a seemingly inexorable rise.

Gun-related deaths among US children rose by almost 30 per cent between 2019 and 2020, twice that of the general population.

In all, more than 4,300 Americans under the age of 18 were killed by guns in 2020, compared to about 2,000 who succumbed to cancer.

Tuesday’s massacre of 19 students and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas, marks just the latest grim milestone in a longer-term trend.

The shooting at Robb Elementary School comes nearly a decade after a gunman killed 20 children aged six and seven, and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The shooting of so many, and such young students, shook the nation, but its gun sales have continued to rise.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, gun purchases hit a staggering two million per month.

They rose again during the coronavirus pandemic, peaking at 2.5 million in 2020, the biggest spike since records began two decades prior.

In the decade since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, the ratio of guns to Americans increased from 88 per 100 residents to 120 guns for every 100 people.

The figure tops that of Yemen, a country riven by war for the past eight years, which has fewer than half the number of guns per 100 civilians, totalling 52.8.

Coming in joint third are Serbia and Montenegro, each with 39.1 firearms per resident.

The US’s gun figures are even more staggering in the context of the rest of the developed world.

Its firearm homicide rate, for instance, totals 4.1 per 100,000 people, while the UK’s is virtually zero.

Second to the US are Cyprus and Canada, both with 0.5 gun-related homicides per 100,000.

Those calling for stricter firearms control measures argue there is a correlation between laissez-faire gun laws and violence.

Everytown for Gun Safety, an organisation committed to gun control, said in Texas, where the sale of weapons is only marginally regulated, an average of more than 3,600 people are killed by guns every year.

Even by the US’s grim record, recent statistics have made for grim reading.

There were 19,350 shooting-related murders in 2020, a historic high, and 35 per cent more than 2019, according to data from US health authorities.

More shootings in 2022 than there were days

The number rose again last year, with more than 45,000 gun deaths recorded, including 20,920 murders.

This year does not hold much hope of reversing that tide: in 2022, there have already been more shootings than there have been days.

Only five months into the year, more than 17,000 people, including 650 minors, have been killed by guns in the US, according to a count by the Gun Violence Archive.

About 7,600 of them were victims of homicide, either purposeful or accidental, and more than 9,500 died by suicide.

What is driving the spike? Officials have speculated that the struggles of poverty and the Covid-19 pandemic could be contributing factors to rising crime rates as well as gun sales.

The right to bear arms is guaranteed in the second amendment of the US Constitution, and the number of pistols, revolvers and other gun types has increased in recent years.

More than 23 million guns were sold in 2020, a record, and almost 20 million in 2021, according to data by the site Small Arms Analytics.

Despite widespread outrage from the American public and its lawmakers in the wake of tragedies like the one at Robb Elementary School, polling suggests that American support for stricter gun laws is at its lowest level since 2014.

According to polling by Gallup published late last year, only 52 per cent of respondents said they wanted stricter gun laws, while 35 per cent were happy with the status quo.

Eleven per cent said gun laws should be “made less strict”.

Predictably, the issue divides largely along political lines, with Democrats “nearly unanimous in their support for stricter gun laws” and just 24 per cent of Republicans supportive of such measures.