Social Justice Policy Brief #178 | Inijah Quadri | September 12, 2025
Policy Issue Summary
Gunfire remains a defining crisis in the United States. On an average day, roughly 125 people are killed with guns and many more are wounded, a toll that reverberates through classrooms, workplaces, and families. Recent data compilations show that by late August 2025 the country had already endured more than 300 mass shootings this year, with hundreds killed and well over a thousand injured. These are not abstractions; they are neighbors, classmates, and coworkers.
Best available estimates put the U.S. civilian gun stock in the hundreds of millions: the Small Arms Survey estimated ~393 million civilian-held firearms in 2018, and industry analyses of ATF manufacturing/import data suggest the total may be around 500 million as at 2025. Ownership is unevenly distributed: about 32% of U.S. adults personally own a gun and another 10% live in gun-owning households; ownership is far more common in rural (47%) than suburban (30%) or urban (20%) areas. Recent U.S. production skews toward handguns and rifles; ATF reports ~9.8 million firearms manufactured in 2023 (about 4.0M pistols and 3.1M rifles).
The headlines of 2024–2025 underscore the point. A celebratory Super Bowl parade in Kansas City became a crime scene, with one person killed and 22 wounded, many of them children. A 16-year-old opened fire at a Colorado high school, gravely injuring two classmates. Last week, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah university jolted the country yet again, and it follows the 2024 attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. Whether violence is politically motivated or not, the through-line is access to firearms that can end lives in seconds.
Why does the U.S. have so many guns? Several structural factors matter: (1) permissive carry policy—29 states now allow permitless concealed carry; (2) sustained political influence—gun-rights groups spent about $14.7 million on federal lobbying in 2024, led by the industry trade group NSSF; and (3) cultural patterns—protection is the top reason owners cite for having a gun.
Beyond policy, there are deeper reasons the civilian stock is so large. A long-standing constitutional tradition of an individual right to bear arms has normalized private ownership across generations; a strong rural hunting and sport-shooting culture introduces firearms early in life; and many owners cite personal protection as their primary motivation. At the same time, uneven rules and enforcement—such as the absence of universal background checks nationwide and the spread of permitless carry across dozens of states—lower barriers to acquisition. Additionally, in a highly polarized environment, inflammatory political rhetoric that frames fellow Americans as threats reinforces demand for guns kept for self-defense.
Gun violence is also not primarily a “mental-health problem.” Most U.S. firearm deaths are suicides (58% in 2023), and among interpersonal violence, serious mental illness accounts for only a small share of overall violent acts (often estimated around 3–5%). Risk is driven more by access to guns, prior violent behavior (including domestic abuse), substance misuse, and situational conflicts. Mental-health care is vital—especially for suicide prevention—but blaming mental illness for most shootings misdiagnoses the drivers of gun harm.
Law and policy are not static. The Supreme Court last year upheld the federal law disarming those under domestic-violence restraining orders (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) bars possession of firearms or ammunition by a person subject to a qualifying domestic-violence restraining order entered after notice and a hearing; the order must either find a “credible threat” to an intimate partner/child or expressly prohibit the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force. The Court upheld § 922(g)(8) in United States v. Rahimi on June 21, 2024, and in March 2025 it upheld the Biden-era rule that closes the “ghost gun” loophole by requiring serial numbers and background checks for build-at-home kits.
At the state level, Maine enacted its strongest gun-safety package after the Lewiston massacre, including a three-day waiting period and expanded background checks. Yet the new federal administration has simultaneously walked back public-health framing of gun violenceand disbanded/cut spending meant for national coordination offices, leaving a patchwork response ill-suited to a national emergency. “Public-health framing” means treating firearm injury like other preventable injuries—using surveillance data, risk-factor analysis, and evidence-based prevention (e.g., safe-storage, ERPOs, community violence intervention), as reflected in the U.S. Surgeon General’s June 2024 advisory declaring firearm violence a public health crisis; HHS removed that advisory from its site in March 2025.
Analysis
From a progressive perspective, the status quo is intolerable because it normalizes preventable death. The United States couples the world’s most permissive civilian gun market with weak gatekeeping: no universal background checks, broad public carry, minimal training, and ready access to high-capacity, rapid-fire weaponry. Predictably, the result is more shootings of every kind—mass violence, domestic assaults, community shootings, suicides—than our peer nations experience.
Evidence points toward an ambitious, comprehensive strategy. Firearm purchaser licensing—permits that require fingerprinting, in-person applications, and safety training—has been associated with fewer gun homicides and dramatically fewer fatal mass shootings. When states adopt licensing, violence falls; when they repeal it, violence rises. These are not speculative models but population-level findings echoed across multiple studies, including one conducted by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For example, a 2025 peer-reviewed Injury Prevention study found that adopting purchaser-licensing laws was associated with decreases in firearm homicide and suicide among 15–24-year-olds, while repeals were followed by increases; earlier multi-state analyses also linked licensing to lower firearm deaths.
Regulating the hardware matters too. In March 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the Biden-era rule that brings “ghost guns”—build-it-yourself, untraceable kits—under the Gun Control Act, requiring serial numbers and background checks for kits and key parts. (In Bondi v. VanDerStok (Mar. 26, 2025), the Court held 7–2 that ATF may regulate at least some weapon-parts kits and unfinished frames/receivers under the Gun Control Act of 1968.)
The Gun Control Act (1968) is the federal baseline: it defines “firearm” for serialization and records, requires federal licensing of dealers, restricts interstate sales, and disqualifies “prohibited persons.” Other key federal statutes include the National Firearms Act (1934) (tax/registration for machine guns, short-barreled rifles/shotguns, and suppressors), the Brady Act (1993) creating the FBI’s NICS background-check system, the Lautenberg Amendment (1996) barring those convicted of misdemeanor domestic-violence offenses, and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (2022) (enhanced checks for under-21 buyers, new straw-purchasing/trafficking crimes, and funding for violence-intervention). The ruling affirmed ATF’s authority to regulate at least some weapon-parts kits, while leaving room for case-by-case challenges.
Courts have also begun to uphold state-level bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines under the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen test. In April 2025, the First Circuit upheld Massachusetts’s long-standing assault weapons ban at the preliminary-injunction stage, a major win for the state’s post-Bruen framework. In June 2025, the Supreme Court declined to review other challenges, leaving in place rulings upholding Maryland’s assault-weapons ban and Rhode Island’s 10-round magazine limit. Research points in the same direction.
Peer-reviewed studies associate large-capacity-magazine limits with fewer high-fatality mass shootings and lower death tolls, and evidence reviews conclude that restricting assault-style rifles and magazine size likely reduces casualties when shootings occur. Taken together, the law and the data support acting now—not waiting for perfect certainty while lives are lost. Illustratively, a Public Health study found that states without bans on large-capacity magazines experienced more mass shootings with high numbers of deaths; those shootings tended to be deadlier. Broader reviews, like one from RAND, say the evidence on assault weapon bans is weak or unclear, but there’s some support that limiting magazine size can reduce the number of casualties.
Public opinion, even amid polarization, provides permission to move. Majorities still favor stricter gun laws overall and support an assault-weapons ban, with overwhelming support among Democrats for banning assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. Americans have already accepted robust safety regimes for driving, aviation, and consumer products; they are not allergic to rules that demonstrably save lives.
Policy should therefore meet the scale of the crisis. A proper blueprint starts with national purchaser licensing and universal background checks, mandatory safe-storage standards with liability for negligence, a ban on assault-style weapons and magazines over ten rounds, waiting periods, age 21 minimums for all gun purchases, and a federal buyback that shrinks the stock of the most lethal firearms. It also includes repealing special liability shields for the gun industry, closing trafficking pipelines with recordkeeping and inspections, and sustained investment in community-based violence-intervention programs that reduce shootings without increasing incarceration. Each component is feasible within existing constitutional contours, particularly after Rahimi and the ghost-guns ruling affirmed that lawmakers can disarm dangerous individuals and regulate modern firearm technologies.
States need not wait for Congress. Maine’s post-Lewiston reforms show that waiting periods and background-check expansion are politically achievable even in gun-owning states. The data infrastructure to track progress exists today in the Gun Violence Archive (a nonpartisan database that compiles incidents from about 7,500 law-enforcement, media, and government sources; counts are incident-level and near-real-time, and GVA defines a “mass shooting” as four or more people shot, injured or killed, excluding the shooter) and in public-health centers, and it should be federally funded, standardized, and linked to real-time enforcement. Momentum grows when policies deliver visible safety gains—fewer stolen guns, fewer domestic-violence shootings, fewer kids shot at school or at parades. This is the horizon we should demand, not another year of elegies.
Engagement Resources
Gun Violence Archive (Gun Violence Archive): Incident-level, real-time data and clear methodology used by journalists and researchers; indispensable for tracking trends and accountability.
Everytown Research & Policy (Everytown Research & Policy): Extensive research syntheses, policy explainers, and state-by-state solutions, including detailed briefs on assault-weapons and background-check reforms.
Giffords Law Center (GIFFORDS): Legal analysis, litigation updates, and a comprehensive database of state gun laws to support advocacy and drafting.
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions (Bloomberg School of Public Health): Gold-standard public-health research on purchaser licensing, safe storage, ERPOs, and more, with accessible summaries for advocates.
The Trace (The Trace): Nonprofit newsroom dedicated to gun-violence reporting, data projects, and investigations that illuminate policy choices and industry influence.