Editors' Note

The numbers are staggering. With somewhere between 350 and 450 million guns in a country of 340 million people, the United States doesn’t just lead the world in gun ownership, it exists in a category of its own. Yemen, the country with the second-highest gun ownership rate, still has fewer than half as many guns per capita as we do. If the U.S. vanished tomorrow, nearly half of all civilian-owned firearms worldwide would disappear with it.

America’s gun landscape seems to operate like a one-way ratchet. We’re not Australia, and the fact that recent mass shootings — including one last week targeting children worshipping at a Minneapolis church — barely register national shock anymore demonstrates that dramatic policy action remains politically infeasible. Meanwhile, gun manufacturing and sales continue their upward trajectory with no signs of abating.

But accepting this reality doesn’t mean accepting futility. Most debates about guns in America get stuck in the same place: Does owning a gun make a person safer? What’s the right balance between individual rights and collective safety? Who should be allowed to own one or be punished in cases of misuse?

These questions, entwined with individuals’ deeply held values and personal traditions, have kept us in a deadlock. While these demand-side questions remain important, what if we focused on supply? How did America end up with so many guns and what are the most realistic ways to reduce firearm related harms?

Understanding the systems, policies and business practices that flood firearms into American communities might reveal new opportunities to reduce gun harms — the goal both sides of this debate actually share.

For this issue, Vital City assembled an all-star cast of people to dig into the problem of gun supply, each bringing different experiences, perspectives and solutions: contributors whose lives have been touched by guns on the streets of our cities, on the battlefield and in the fields and forests of the nation; experts who have taught gun safety and worked in the trenches of government and advocacy to change the nation’s gun policies; historians who have written amicus briefs for recent Supreme Court cases; scholars who have studied guns across many disciplines, including sociology, economics, medicine and history; people who grew up with guns and those whose loved ones have been taken by them.

Our nation’s relationship with guns was not always this fraught or this deadly. Historians Brian DeLay, Jack Rakove and Robert Spitzer show how limited the availability of guns was at the beginning of the republic dedicated to uses that were essentially utilitarian, not consumerist; collective, not individual; government-led instead of government-phobic. Emergency physician Stephen Hargarten and historian Jennifer Tucker reveal how firearms and ammunition have become brutally more sophisticated over time. Today’s bullets can travel at more than 2,600 feet per second and deliver nine times the kinetic energy of Colonial-era musket balls, yet these crucial distinctions in lethality rarely enter policy discussions.

Nick Suplina, from Everytown — an organization that has been at the forefront of shaping the strategies for “common-sense gun laws” — adds to this explanation of our current gun culture. He shows that the intense political polarization around firearms isn’t some inevitable part of American DNA. Instead, it was an explicit marketing strategy starting with the 1893 World’s Fair, known as the “the fair that changed America.” The “Wild West” mythology that dominates our gun debates would be unrecognizable to most Americans throughout history. What we think of as timeless gun culture is actually a modern creation.

Andrew McKevitt and Greg Lickenbrock, each from their different perspectives as historian and firearm analyst, trace how firearms manufacturers and importers deliberately transformed their market from sporting goods to political identity. McKevitt locates a major inflection point after World War II, when enterprising gun dealers capitalized on military surplus firearms from across the globe to fuel mass consumer demand for guns. They didn’t just sell guns; they sold the idea that owning a gun was essential to being American. They marketed military weapons to civilians and funded the lobbying infrastructure that fights any regulation. When you follow the money, you see how financial incentives have shaped our current crisis.

But this manufactured gun culture doesn’t just exist in marketing; it gets transmitted through training and culture. Combat veteran Chris Marvin exposes how civilian gun courses teach people “how to get away with shooting” rather than military-style discipline about when not to shoot. Sociologist Samantha Simon reveals how police training creates a paradox among cadets. Officers learn to fear guns as threats while remaining staunchly pro-Second Amendment, resolving this tension by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” gun owners along racial and class lines.

Perhaps, if gun culture can be manufactured, it can also be reengineered. Nina Vinik, founder of Project Unloaded, demonstrates this possibility by using social media, peer influence and targeted messaging to reach young people before they form opinions about guns. Unlike older generations, teens seem open to changing their minds when presented with facts about gun risks, suggesting that the cultural tide may be reversible.

Some of the most prominent gun researchers in the land draw on their lifetimes of experience to suggest what can be done. As the economists Philip Cook and Rosanna Smart point out, efforts on the regulatory front are not futile at all, because even “seemingly weak regulations can often have leverage on even life-and-death outcomes.” The research reveals key leaks in the system and leverage points to patch them up. Sociologist and public health expert Daniel Semenza reminds us that just 5% of federally licensed dealers are linked to nearly 90% of crime guns recovered by law enforcement. Focusing on this small fraction of bad-apple dealers offers a clear path to reducing gun violence. Economist Jens Ludwig offers a crucial reframe in thinking about gun violence: We may be deterring the wrong behavior. Most gun violence stems from heated arguments that escalate impulsively, making the trigger-pull among the least deterrable moments. Instead, deterrence should focus upstream on the deliberate choice to carry guns illegally in the first place.

But patching federal leaks isn’t enough when millions of guns change hands in the secondary market — private sales at gun shows, online transactions and sales between individuals — completely outside federal oversight. In this vast space, regulation falls entirely to states. Three scholars of firearm policy, Morgan Williams, Megan Kang and Patrick Sharkey, demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, state gun laws make a significant difference both when restrictive laws are repealed (leading to more gun deaths and racial disparities in policing) and when enacted (decreasing gun deaths). In a country where the federal government has become increasingly hostile to gun regulation, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and reporter Olivia Li suggest states could pick up the slack by holding gun manufacturers more accountable.

Economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi highlight how guns remain exempt from the basic safety standards we demand from every other consumer product. They argue for treating firearms more like cars through registration, licensing and mandatory liability insurance, noting that automobile regulation also evolved from scattered state laws to coordinated national standards.

These pieces shift the focus from ideological battles to tractable levers at key supply points that could have an outsize impact. Hanging over it all, however, is the warning that Cook and Smart point out: “The problem in regulating gun commerce to reduce gun violence is not some intrinsic futility but rather the lack of political will.”

What happens then when a nation musters the political will to change? Reporter and researcher Ted Alcorn diagnoses how Australia was able successfully to reduce gun deaths without eliminating gun ownership, with a set of regulations that brought back much of the nation’s supply of guns.

Not least, the personal stories in this issue remind us that behind all these policy discussions are real people — some with rich familial traditions of gun ownership, some with scars of gun violence and some with both. These voices reveal nuance that gets lost in our polarized debates.

Our issue makes a case for shifting focus toward gun supply, where the evidence shows that slow but steady progress through basic governance tools can actually work. This isn’t about finding a silver bullet, but recognizing that incremental changes can have cumulative effects. Supply-side interventions offer clear leverage points for reducing gun violence without requiring impossible legislative overhauls. They may lack dramatic appeal, but they provide realistic pathways to reduce the harm that America’s 400 million (or more) guns inflict on our communities, through the slow but steady work of making America safer.