The data actually supports the point I’m making. The U.S. isn’t uniquely violent in every category — in fact, non-lethal crimes like assault or robbery can be as high or higher elsewhere (Canada sometimes reports higher overall violent crime rates).

What makes the U.S. look “uniquely violent” is the lethality of those acts. The same fights, disputes, or criminal acts that would end in bruises elsewhere often end in fatalities here because a gun is involved.

That means the root problem is why so many people are reaching for violence in the first place. Guns raise the body count, but they don’t create the conditions that make people violent — poverty, inequality, untreated trauma, social breakdown, and lack of trust in institutions do.

So yes, we need to be honest: regulating guns might change the tool, but it won’t fix the pipeline of violence unless we deal with those underlying drivers.

As you just stated, it would reduce the lethality.

But not the violence.