America’s response to gun violence is built on myths about policing, deterrence and constitutional rights, while political leaders continue to avoid the reforms most likely to save lives.
Last week’s depraved proposal to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of fatally shooting 13 unarmed US soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in 2009; the botched attempted execution of Christina Pike in Tennessee; and yet another mass shooting, this time in Pennsylvania, are just the recent, albeit graphic, illustrations of what is wrong with crime and punishment in the US and how easily it could be fixed if anyone had the moral spine to stand up to the corporate and political interests that profit from no change.
The mass shooting is a good place to start because mass shootings are common in the US and they get a disproportionate amount of media coverage. A man fatally shot eight people, including a pregnant woman and children, in Erie, Pennsylvania, before killing himself. It was a handgun and all eight were dead before first responders could get there. That tells us a lot.
There are too many myths about gun violence in the US. Let’s start with the police. Los Angeles has 8,600 police officers for its about four million people. Now I would like you to pause and guess how many police officers Berlin (population also four million) has.
If you guessed fewer than Los Angeles, you were wrong. Berlin has more than double the number of cops as Los Angeles, at 18,073.
The myth is that the US is over-policed. People on the left have even called for police de-funding, perpetrating the idiotic idea that fewer police will mean fewer black people killed. The US is in fact chronically under-policed. Most cities have half the number of most European or Australian cities of the same size.
Erie, for example, has just 173 cops for 263,000 people, or 0.6 per 1,000. Canberra, at 731 cops, has about three times as many per head.
The results of under-policing are deadly for public safety. Essentially, police are confined to patrol cars with lots of guns and rifles. They are not part of the community. There are not enough of them to engage people at street level and hear about trouble before it escalates. They are seen as enemies, not friends.
But increasing police numbers meets resistance in a nation that prefers lower taxes to greater government services.
Fewer cops lowers the chance of criminals being caught. Unless criminals are caught quickly, the chance of getting away with it increases, as there are too few cops following up leads while the trail is hot.
The certainty of being caught is the best deterrent. In its absence, the US criminal-justice system relies on severity of sentence – long jail terms and lots of jails. The US has about 550 people per head in jail, more than double the Australian rate of 216.
But prisons in the US are mostly run by the private sector for profit. Police are supplied by the taxpayer. The profit motive wins.
Now to guns. Much of US efforts to curb guns has concentrated on ‘assault rifles’ and mass shootings. It is misdirected. Much more violence is caused by handguns.
In the US, 1,741 people have been killed in public mass shootings (four plus) since 1966, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. In just 2021, 21,000 people were murdered by gunshot. And that does not include the 26,000 suicides by firearm.
I do not want to batter you with statistics, but the fundamental point is that all the media coverage and documentaries and fiction have generated a fundamentally inaccurate picture of a nation crawling with cops facing riflemen shooting in public places causing multiple deaths.
If the problem is approached that way, do not expect dramatic results. In 2024, 44,447 died of gun violence in the US (15,000 were homicides compared to just 140 in Australia). There is one gun death per 7,700 people in the US compared to 132,000 people in Australia. You are 17 times more likely to die of gunshot in the US than Australia.
The next myth is that the US is making progress on gun violence. Gun homicides peaked in 1993 at about 9.5 per 100,000 people in the US and have fallen to about four per 100,000 now. But a great deal of that can be put down to improved treatment, both by paramedics and hospitals. And it does not address the fundamental problem that 73,000 people a year are shot, even if they survive. This is because there are too many guns, not because there are too many people.
After Australia introduced strict gun laws and compulsorily acquired and destroyed 650,000 guns in 1996, gun deaths fell from 480 the year before to just 206 in 2024, and there were no mass shootings for the next 30 years. If a similar thing were done in the US, 20,000 lives would be saved.
The next myth is that the US Constitution guarantees the right to own and carry arms, so nothing can be done. First, the ‘gun rights’ are in the Second Amendment. It is an amendment to the Constitution which, logically, can be re-amended, if anyone has the political courage to start the process.
Second, ‘gun rights’ is really a creation of a Supreme Court corrupted by Republican-, mainly Trump-appointed judges, in the 2022 Bruen case that overturned New York’s Sullivan Act. That act required a gun-holder to have a licence based on a special need beyond mere self-defence.
For more than a century, that act cut suicide rates by more than a third, because without a gun, many people rather avoid suicide than use another method.
But Justice Clarence Roberts wrote, “Modern gun regulations must be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” – whatever that ‘tradition’ is. The court ignored the fact that the Second Amendment puts the bearing of arms in the context of the need for ‘a free state to raise a militia’ and was only ever proposed to allay fears of slave-owners so that Virginia would join the union.
In the future, maybe judges with a better moral sense and more attuned to community needs might reverse that warped piece of jurisprudence, which put people’s right to be free of gun violence and families to be spared suicide behind the right of someone to swagger down a New York street with a gun.
The last myth is that the severity of penalty, rather than its certainty, reduces crime. Not so, because the great majority of homicides are caused when people’s emotions get out of control in the heat of the moment, not by criminals with intent to kill or injure as part of a robbery or on instruction.
Heat-of-the-moment killers are not going to be deterred by the thought of capital punishment or life in prison because at the time they are not thinking rationally at all and they are acting very quickly, not in a measured way.
Many nations deter crime without capital punishment or life without parole (its life-for-a-life equivalent) much more successfully than the US, as their homicide rates attest.
Capital punishment is just there for macho state governors to catch the votes of its sadistic supporters. It does not deter crime. Indeed, it is more likely to evoke pity, as in the case of Christina Pike, or horror, as in the case of Nidal Hasan.
How did a country so smart become so dumb and so blind to the evidence? How did a country that trades on political and democratic exceptionalism become so exceptionally depraved as to have a public execution and do nothing about the cycle of gun violence? Because the people in power, and those who vote for them, lack the moral courage and clarity to stand up to the profiteers in the firearms industry and do something about it.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 12 October 2026.
Republished from Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull has written for The Canberra Times for 30 years on a huge range of topics, but mainly legal and constitutional. He was Editor for seven years. He taught journalism at the University of Canberra, and is the author of ‘The High Court of Australia 1903-2003’ and ‘Canberra – Australia’s National Capital’. He is also a marine rescue skipper on the Great Barrier Reef with Marine Rescue Queensland.