From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, May 25th.

The U.S. has 120 firearms per 100 residents. In other words, 20% more guns than people in this country. And that's up in

recent years from 88 per 100, so a little less than a gun per person, as recently as 2011. So 10 years

we did not have more guns per person than people. Now we do.

Gun possession is becoming more common in this country, not less, despite all the gun violence.

And a rate of gun ownership far surpasses that of any other country around the world.

We are truly unique in this respect. Again, by the numbers,

the next closest, according to the BBC, is Yemen, a country in a civil war, and they only have

55 guns per 100 residents when we have 120. In the year 2020, the last year that complete data is available for,

there were 38,355 deaths by firearms in this country. Now, there are 365 days in a year,

38,000 deaths.

The math is pretty easy there.

A little more than 100 gun deaths every day in this country.

And of those 38,000 gun deaths, around 24,000 were suicides.

Most were suicides.

We've talked about this before, but a lot of people don't realize this. It's a lot

easier to kill yourself with a gun than any other way. Public health people talk about suicides

on the rise in this country. Maybe they track the rise in gun ownership in conjunction with that.

I don't know, but I wonder how many fewer successful suicide attempts there would be without the unique proliferation of guns here.

Around 14,000 of those 38,000 gun deaths were homicides.

About 1,300 of the gun deaths, most of the rest were accidents or other incidents.

Now, of all the murders in the United States, the vast majority, around 80% are with a gun.

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