From the June 21 edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes:
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): As we wait to see what happens with this legislation, it is worth in these moments taking a step back from this latest horrific mass shooting, the AR-15 style assault weapon used to carry it out, and consider the problem of American gun violence in its totality. Regardless of what legislation may have impacted this single incident, here are the basic facts about America and guns. Every year approximately 30,000 Americans die from guns, two-thirds of them suicides. Gun deaths are now poised to surpass auto fatalities in the US as a cause of death largely due to the decline of auto fatalities while gun deaths do not decline. America has an estimated 357 million guns, according to the Washington Post investigation, based on data from the Congressional Research Service and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives. That is more guns than there are people. Let me say that again. America has more guns in circulation than human beings. US has more guns per capita than any other nation in the world, with Yemen, the war-torn nation of Yemen, coming in a distant second. And by far America has the most gun-related homicides among the world's most developed nations. The US gun-related homicide rate is 25 times higher compared with a group of 22 other OECD countries. Guns in America are not protecting us, they are killing us. The permissiveness of our gun laws to the ubiquity of our gun ownership, to the normalcy of people dying at the hand of bullets, there is nothing like it anywhere in the developed democratized world. That is the basic reality our legislators have to deal with.
