I recalled a couple of unsettling incidents from the past today.

From Dec 2012 to be precise.

On Dec 14, 2012, a mass shooting occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. The perpetrator, a 20-year-old shot and killed 26 people. 20 of the victims were children between 6 and 7 years old.

My older girl had just turned a year old at the time, and I still remember, despite being thousands of miles away from the scene of the tragedy, how raw and visceral the horror felt.

Prohibit Guns! That idea played on a loop in my mind.

And yet, that loop was broken within a 48-hour window when, on Dec 16, 2012, the Nirbhaya case rocked the collective conscience of India.

I found myself wondering: She should have been armed. Not with a knife. Not with a taser. But with a loaded firearm.

Gun ownership in the US is legally protected by the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution. So, the dilemma here isn’t really something along the lines of Gun Ownership Vs. Prohibition.

Gun Ownership ─ even after the assassination attempt on Trump yesterday ─ in the US isn’t going away anytime now.

But a narrow window to moderate the gun culture has possibly opened yesterday.

For starters, consider how dense gun ownership is in the US:

1. The Small Arms Survey (SAS), undertaken in 2018, stated that American civilians account for an estimated 393 million (about 46%) of the worldwide total of civilian held firearms or about 120.5 firearms for every 100 American residents.

2. The share of US households owning at least one firearm has remained steady since 1972, hovering between 37% and 47%. In 2023, about 42% of U.S. households had at least one gun in their possession.

You see the problem now; guns are an essential small white-good in US households. And ownership has been generational and sticky across time.

It’s also clear that the US gun culture is an outlier to the rest of the world. (As is their firearm homicide rate: at 4 per 100,000 people, the US has the highest firearm homicide rate in the developed world!

For comparison, Indonesia with a population of 280 mio has a near zero gun-ownership for every 100 civilians. Mexico is at 13. UK and India at 5. (Source: SAS 2017)

With such an entrenched gun culture, where exactly is that window to moderate that I referred to earlier?

Well, not surprisingly, US politicians have made earnest efforts to repeal existing gun regulations, not when Sandy Hooks or mass shootings have happened, but when one of their own ilk was the target.

Kennedy’s assassination led to the passage of the Gun Control Act,1968.

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act,1993 was passed after an attempt to assassinate Reagan.

My guess is the first signs of moderation could come with a renewed total ban on Assault Weapons (The Federal Assault Weapons Ban enacted in 1994 expired in 2004). Refer image to get an idea of how things stand now. This survey was undertaken between Jan 27 – 29, 2023.