Why the United States Suffers from Exceptionally High Rates of Intentional Homicide: Cross-National and Intra-National Comparisons Demonstrate that the Primary Cause is the Extraordinarily High Rates of Firearms Possession That is Necessary to Sustain the Financial Health of the Gun Industry

Despite decadal declines in homicides, followed by a new surge in killings including of mass shootings, America continues to be afflicted by murder rates many times higher than any other prosperous democracy. Proposed causes for this national dysfunction include laws that allow rates of private gun ownership that are similarly many times higher than the international norm, insufficient gun regulations and/or law enforcement, gender inequality, inadequate mental health intervention, declines in popular religiosity and traditional family values, dysfunctional socioeconomic conditions, socialistic policies, and a large minority population cohort. In order to test these possibilities viabilities, cross-national comparisons of these factors in the advanced democracies are conducted, along with intra-national comparisons between states, and over time. The results find that an extremely high level of ownership of guns is the only factor that strongly correlates with, and adequately explains, the similarly high levels of American homicide. Also showing a significant relationship is more gender equality with less deadly violence. Altering the nongun factors is not likely to be able to dramatically decrease American homicide rates to first world norms. The evidence shows that the solution to American murder is not the gun industry further boosting the distribution and carriage of small arms, rather the financial survival of that industry depends upon high rates of murder driving gun sales. It is very probably necessary to reduce the number of guns in circulation by at least two thirds, or 250+ million weapons, to suppress homicide to normal first world levels. If such is not feasible than the homicide toll will be over one hundred thousand more than it probably otherwise would be over the next decade.