The Second Amendment is real — and so is the evidence that licensing, red flag laws, and safe storage save thousands of lives every year.
We're a policy platform with 50 researched positions on every major issue. This page breaks down our gun policy plan — but there's much more to explore.
The United States accounts for 4% of the world's population but owns 46% of the world's civilian firearms. In 2022, 48,204 Americans died from gun-related injuries — more than car crashes, more than any infectious disease. No other wealthy nation comes close to this level of carnage, and the reasons are structural, not cultural.
The first driver is unique gun saturation. There are approximately 400 million firearms in civilian hands in the United States — more guns than people. This saturation is not the result of organic demand alone. The firearms industry has spent decades marketing weapons as identity products, and the NRA has systematically blocked every attempt to study, track, or regulate gun ownership at the federal level. The result is a country where acquiring a gun is often easier than renting an apartment or getting a driver's license.
The second driver is weak and fragmented federal regulation. The United States has no national gun licensing system, no universal background check requirement, and no federal red flag law. Individual states set their own rules, creating a patchwork where guns purchased legally in one state flow freely into states with stricter laws. An estimated 22% of all gun sales occur without any background check — through private sales, gun shows, and online transactions that exploit federal loopholes.
The third driver is the state-by-state patchwork itself. States like California, New York, and Massachusetts have comprehensive gun safety laws and correspondingly lower gun death rates. States like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have minimal regulation and gun death rates 3-4 times higher. But because there are no border checks between states, guns flow from low-regulation states to high-regulation states, undermining local efforts. A national floor of gun safety standards is the only way to address interstate trafficking.
The fourth driver is mental health access gaps. Over 54% of gun deaths are suicides, and suicide is disproportionately an impulse act — studies show that 70% of suicide attempt survivors do not go on to die by suicide. Access to lethal means during a crisis is the decisive factor. Countries with strong gun licensing requirements have dramatically lower firearm suicide rates. The Common Good plan addresses both sides: comprehensive mental health coverage and evidence-based restrictions on impulsive access to firearms.
Yes. The evidence is overwhelming. Peer-reviewed research consistently shows that specific gun safety measures — licensing, red flag laws, safe storage requirements, and universal background checks — reduce gun deaths significantly. The question is not whether these policies work. It's why the US refuses to implement them.
Licensing is the single most effective gun policy intervention. The RAND Corporation's comprehensive review of gun policy research found that state-level firearm licensing laws are associated with a 14-15% reduction in gun homicides. Connecticut's 1995 permit-to-purchase law was followed by a 40% reduction in gun homicides over the subsequent decade. When Missouri repealed its permit-to-purchase law in 2007, gun homicides increased by 25% within five years. The mechanism is straightforward: licensing ensures that every gun buyer passes a background check, completes safety training, and is known to law enforcement.
Red flag laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders) allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from individuals in crisis. Indiana's red flag law, enacted in 2005, has been associated with a 7.5% reduction in gun suicides. Connecticut's ERPO law shows similar results. These laws work because firearm suicide is overwhelmingly impulsive — removing access during the critical window saves lives without permanently restricting rights.
Safe storage requirements reduce child gun deaths, accidental discharges, and gun theft. Unsecured firearms are the primary source of weapons used in school shootings and adolescent suicides. An estimated 4.6 million American children live in homes with loaded, unlocked firearms. States with child access prevention laws have 13% fewer gun suicides among children. Safe storage is not an infringement on gun rights — it is basic responsibility, like wearing a seatbelt or locking up prescription medications.
Background check loopholes are the weakest link in the current system. Federal law requires licensed dealers to conduct background checks — but an estimated 22% of gun sales occur through private sellers, gun shows, and online marketplaces where no check is required. States that have closed this loophole with universal background check laws have 15% fewer gun homicides. The Common Good plan makes universal background checks a federal requirement for every gun transfer, with no exceptions.
The Common Good plan implements seven evidence-based gun safety measures that have been proven to reduce gun deaths — while explicitly protecting the Second Amendment right of law-abiding Americans to own firearms. Rights respected. Lives protected.
Every provision in this plan is modeled on policies that already exist in US states or peer democracies and have demonstrated results. This is not theoretical — it is implemented, measured, and proven. The plan respects the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which affirmed an individual right to bear arms while explicitly stating that the right is "not unlimited."
For the complete plan with legislative detail, legal analysis, and sourcing, see the full gun policy issue page.
The United States is a dramatic outlier among wealthy democracies on every measure of gun violence. No other peer nation has anything remotely comparable to American gun death rates, mass shooting frequency, or civilian firearm saturation. The data is not close.
| Country | Gun Deaths/100K | Guns per 100 People | Licensing Required | Mass Shootings/Decade | Key Policy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 12.2 | 120.5 | No federal requirement | 600+/year | No universal background checks |
| Canada | 2.0 | 34.7 | Yes — PAL required | 3 | Licensing, registration, restricted classes |
| United Kingdom | 0.2 | 4.6 | Yes — strict | 1 | Handgun ban, licensing, safe storage |
| Australia | 0.9 | 14.5 | Yes — strict | 0 | Buyback, licensing, registration |
| Germany | 0.9 | 19.6 | Yes — strict | 1 | Licensing, psych evaluation, safe storage |
| Japan | 0.02 | 0.3 | Yes — very strict | 0 | Near-total ban, police inspections |
The pattern is unmistakable. Every country that requires licensing and registration has dramatically lower gun death rates than the United States. Japan, with the strictest laws, has a gun death rate 600 times lower than America. Australia, which reformed its gun laws after a single mass shooting in 1996, has not had a mass shooting since. The United Kingdom reformed after Dunblane in 1996 and has had one mass shooting in nearly three decades. The United States has over 600 mass shootings per year — and has implemented no comprehensive federal reform.
Sources: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Small Arms Survey, Gun Violence Archive, OECD. See the full gun policy issue page for complete sourcing.
On April 28, 1996, a gunman killed 35 people and wounded 23 others at Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia. Twelve days later, the Australian government — led by conservative Prime Minister John Howard — passed the National Firearms Agreement. What followed is the most studied gun reform in modern history.
The National Firearms Agreement had four key elements: a mandatory buyback of semi-automatic and pump-action firearms (approximately 650,000 weapons, or roughly one-fifth of all Australian firearms); a national firearms registry; a licensing system requiring demonstrated "genuine reason" for ownership (self-defense was explicitly excluded); and a 28-day waiting period for all purchases. The reforms were passed with bipartisan support in under two weeks.
The results have been extensively documented by researchers at the University of Sydney, Harvard, and the Australian Institute of Criminology. In the 18 years before Port Arthur, Australia experienced 13 mass shootings (defined as five or more victims). In the nearly three decades since, Australia has had zero. Firearm homicides declined by 42% in the decade following the reforms. Firearm suicides declined by 57%. Total gun deaths fell from 2.6 per 100,000 to 0.9 per 100,000.
Critics have argued that Australia's gun death rate was already declining before Port Arthur. This is true — but the rate of decline accelerated dramatically after the reforms. A 2006 study in Injury Prevention found that the post-reform decline was 3.6 times faster than the pre-reform trend for firearm suicides and no substitution to other methods occurred. A 2016 Journal of the American Medical Association study confirmed these findings.
Australia did not confiscate all firearms. It removed the specific weapon class most associated with mass casualty events and implemented licensing and registration for everything else. Australians still own approximately 3.5 million registered firearms. Hunting, sport shooting, and rural firearm ownership remain common. What Australia eliminated was the unregulated access to weapons of mass killing — and the results speak for themselves. For more on international comparisons, see the Compare Parties page.
The gun lobby spends over $15 million per year on lobbying and tens of millions more on campaign contributions to maintain the regulatory status quo. These are the four myths they rely on — and what the evidence actually shows.
Myth: "More guns make you safer."
Reality: The research consistently shows the opposite. A gun in the home is associated with a 2-3x increased risk of homicide and a 3-5x increased risk of suicide. States with higher gun ownership rates have higher gun death rates — not lower. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has published over a dozen studies confirming this relationship. The "good guy with a gun" narrative is contradicted by FBI data showing that active shooter events are stopped by armed civilians less than 3% of the time. Firearms are used in self-defense in fewer than 1% of violent crimes. The net effect of widespread gun ownership on public safety is negative, not positive.
Myth: "Criminals don't follow gun laws, so laws don't work."
Reality: By this logic, we should eliminate all laws, because criminals break them. Speed limits don't prevent all speeding — but they reduce fatal crashes. The evidence is clear: states with stronger gun laws have lower gun death rates. Connecticut's licensing law reduced gun homicides by 40%. Missouri's repeal of its licensing law increased gun homicides by 25%. Criminals acquire guns through legal channels — straw purchases, gun shows, private sales without background checks — and closing those channels reduces the flow of guns to prohibited persons. The point is not perfection. It is reduction.
Myth: "It's a mental health problem, not a gun problem."
Reality: The United States does not have higher rates of mental illness than other wealthy countries. What it has is dramatically more guns and dramatically easier access to them. Japan, Germany, Australia, and the UK all have comparable rates of mental illness — and gun death rates that are 6 to 600 times lower. Mental health is a real issue that deserves real investment (the Common Good plan includes comprehensive mental health coverage), but framing gun violence as exclusively a mental health problem is a deliberate strategy to avoid any discussion of firearms policy. The data does not support it.
Myth: "The Second Amendment prevents all gun regulation."
Reality: It does not. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court affirmed an individual right to bear arms — and explicitly stated that the right is "not unlimited." Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, listed examples of permissible regulation: prohibitions on possession by felons and the mentally ill, laws forbidding firearms in sensitive places, and conditions on the commercial sale of arms. Licensing, background checks, safe storage laws, and red flag laws are fully consistent with Heller and every subsequent Second Amendment ruling. The claim that the Constitution prohibits all gun regulation is a political argument, not a legal one — and every federal court that has considered the question agrees.
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48,204 Americans die from gun violence every year. Every other wealthy nation has solved this problem while respecting gun ownership. Read the full plan and see exactly how we do both — with sources, evidence, and implementation details.