What Are Guns Used For

Gun violence is a contemporary global human rights issue. Gun-related violence threatens our most central human right, the right to life.

Gun violence is a daily tragedy affecting the lives of individuals around the globe. More 500 people die every twenty-four hours because of violence committed with firearms.

Anyone tin be afflicted by firearm violence but in certain situations gun violence disproportionately impacts communities of color, women and other marginalized groups in guild.

Sometimes, the mere presence of firearms tin can make people feel threatened and fearful for their lives with astringent and long-term psychological furnishings on individuals and whole communities.

When people are afraid of gun violence, this can too have a negative bear upon on people's right to instruction or health intendance when they are as well agape to attend schools or health facilities or if these services are not fully functioning due to firearm violence in their customs.

Amnesty International campaigns for effective gun violence prevention laws and interventions to cease gun violence
Strict regulation of firearms and strategic violence reduction initiatives are the most constructive way of reducing gun violence

Easy admission to firearms – whether legal or illegal – is one of the main drivers of gun violence.

The state has an obligation to maximize the protection of human rights, creating the safest possible surroundings for the most people, peculiarly those considered to be at the greatest risk. If a state does not do acceptable command over the possession and apply of firearms in the face of persistent gun violence, this could amount to a breach of their obligations under international human rights police.

This is why Amnesty International calls on states to fulfil their obligations to introduce and implement strict gun violence prevention laws and regulations. States besides take the duty to establish measures they tin apply to arbitrate at community level to reduce and preclude gun violence in people's daily lives.

Amnesty International campaigns for governments to utilize common-sense gun reform to stop gun violence and protect people'south right to life. Our human rights are not protected if our leaders fail to tackle and stop gun violence and gun deaths.

What is gun violence?

Gun violence is violence committed with the use of firearms, for example pistols, shotguns, assault rifles or machine guns.

Gun violence statistics

How many people die from gun-related violence worldwide?

More 500 people die every day from gun violence
44% of all homicides globally involve gun violence
There were i.4 million firearm-related deaths globally between 2012 and 2016

The majority of victims and perpetrators are young men, but women are particularly at chance of firearms violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Sexual violence can too be facilitated by firearms.

How many people are injured past gunshots worldwide?

An estimated 2,000 people are injured by gunshots every unmarried day
At least ii meg people are living with firearm injuries effectually the world

Millions of people suffer the astringent and long-term psychological effects that gun violence – or the threat of gun violence – brings to individuals, families and their wider customs.

In the USA, nearly 134,000 people were shot and injured past firearms in 2017.

Gunshot injuries are frequently life-changing and have an indelible impact on the victims' long-term mental and physical health. Some demand permanent, lifelong intendance, and many others lose their power to piece of work, particularly in physically enervating jobs. However programmes offering adequate long-term care, rehabilitation and job retraining are almost non-existent. The toll that gun violence has on victims, family members and the medical services has resulted in a chronic public health crisis – with remarkably picayune government response. Access to affordable and quality health care services in the United states of america should include necessary long-term health interventions, including long-term hurting management, rehabilitation and other support services, and mental health care.

How many guns are produced every year globally?

At that place are 8 million new small-scale arms and upward to fifteen billion rounds of ammunition produced each year.

The small arms trade is worth an estimated United states$8.v billion per yr.

Gun violence can lead to a violation of the about primal homo right – the right to life. States accept an obligation to fight actual or foreseeable threats to life and should therefore take measures to protect people from gun violence.

If a state does not adequately control how private individuals own and use firearms, this could amount to a alienation of their obligations nether international homo rights law to protect the rights to life and security of person.

Firearm violence by private actors has a strong socio-economic dimension. It is typically concentrated in low income urban neighbourhoods with high levels of crime. This often includes trafficking in illicit drugs, inadequate policing or policing which does not comply with international standards on human rights and constabulary enforcement, and lack of access to public services.

Easy access to and proliferation of firearms in these circumstances tin can have an bear upon on the community across the full range of human rights.

Gun violence and the right to health

Firearm violence can undermine people'southward right to health. People living in communities with loftier levels of firearm violence can notice it difficult or dangerous to access local wellness care facilities. The partitioning of neighbourhoods past armed criminal gangs tin obstruct access, and frequent official or de facto curfews related to police interventions can close health care services.

In some instances, health-related services may avoid locating in areas of loftier firearm violence because of issues associated with insecurity and poor staff retentivity. Essential psychological support for survivors of domestic violence and provision of refuges or other safe accommodation for those leaving violent relationships are often lacking in deprived neighbourhoods blighted by firearm violence.

Gun violence causes a range of health issues throughout affected communities. Lack of day-to-solar day security can have profound psychological impacts, especially for those who have witnessed shootings, besides equally for family unit members of victims. The survivors of firearm violence can be left severely and chronically physically and psychologically devitalized, in need of long-term medical and social care.

Gun violence and the right to pedagogy

Firearm violence tin disrupt the performance of schools and make students' journeys to and from school dangerous. Lack of state resources for education and the difficulty of recruiting and retaining teaching staff in neighbourhoods wracked by gun violence have a negative impact, undermining the right to educational activity.

Owned firearm violence and associated insecurity can accept a peculiarly serious bear upon on children and adolescents, including past disrupting school attendance and retention, damaging the learning environment, and reducing the quality of teaching. This can in turn lead to poorer life outcomes regarding employment and income, and perpetuate cycles of deprivation, criminal offense and violence.

Gun violence worldwide

Gun violence is particularly prevalent in the Americas where easy admission to firearms, weak regulation or poor implementation of laws designed to gainsay firearms violence prevail. In Latin America and the Caribbean, corruption, organized crime and a dysfunctional criminal justice organisation farther fuel the problem.

Per centum of killings committed with firearms:

72% in Brazil

91.1% in El salvador

58.nine% in Honduras

Gun violence in the United states

Among wealthier, adult countries, the USA is an outlier when it comes to firearm violence. U.s.a. governments accept allowed gun violence to become a human rights crisis. Wide admission to firearms and loose regulations lead to more than 39,000 men, women and children being killed with guns each year in the Us.

On average, more than than 360 people in the USA are shot every day and survive – at least long plenty to get to a hospital.

In 2017, some 39,773 died from gunshot injuries, an average of nearly 109 people each 24-hour interval. Per capita, this is significantly higher than in other industrialized countries. Firearm homicides in the United states disproportionately impact communities of colour and particularly young black men.

The USA lacks measures such equally a national firearm registry.

Individuals can lawfully conduct concealed firearms in public in every state in the U.s. and tin can lawfully openly carry firearms in public in well-nigh states. Nonetheless, there is no nationwide uniformity in laws governing the carrying of firearms in public, and in some states at that place are no laws at all: 12 states allow individuals to carry concealed weapons in public without any licence or permit and xxx states allow the open up conveying of a handgun in public without any licence or permit.

Open carrying of firearms in public, in some form, is currently allowed in 45 states. In only 7 states are people required to provide a credible justification or demonstrated need to carry a concealed firearm. All 50 states and Washington, D.C. allow for some form of concealed carrying of firearms in public.

The Us government is prioritizing gun ownership over bones human being rights. Despite the huge number of guns in apportionment and the sheer numbers of people killed by guns each year, there is a shocking lack of federal regulations that could save thousands.
Margaret Huang, Executive Director of Amnesty International Us

How are discrimination and gun violence connected in the USA?

In the Us, firearm homicide disproportionately impacts African American communities, particularly young black men. xiv,542 people in the The states lost their lives in gun homicides in 2017. African Americans accounted for 58.5% of these nationwide, despite making up simply 13% of the US population.

Firearm homicide was the leading cause of death for black men and boys anile fifteen-34 in 2017, and they were more than 10 times more than likely to die from firearm homicide than white men and boys of the same age group. Failure to address systemic discrimination; failure to go along firearms out of the hands of those nigh likely to misuse them; and a failure to invest in gun violence prevention programmes all contribute to this crisis.

Women facing domestic violence and children are as well unduly affected.

In 2017, the number of children who died from firearm-related deaths in the USA rose to 1,814 from 1,637 in 2016
Between 2% and 7% of all injuries treated at US pediatric trauma centres are gun-related

Nigh children who are victims of firearm killings in the USA are from minority communities. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among black children and 65% of those killings are committed with guns.

Mass shootings stats USA

Mass shootings are typically defined equally shootings where four or more victims are killed. In the USA, between 2009 and 2016, there were:

156 mass shootings
with a total of 848 people killed and
339 injured

Public mass shootings business relationship for less than 1% of gun deaths in the United states.

However, public mass shootings take a profound emotional and psychological effect on survivors, families and communities. They have created an surroundings in which people feel unsafe in public places, such as churches, schools, concert venues and cinemas which impacts their human rights to faith, education and leisure.

School shootings in the The states

Between 2013 and June 2018, there were 316 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in the USA.

The factors that contribute to a child picking upwards a gun are varied and often poorly understood. All the same, in the context of urban communities, youth violence can be associated with fear, need for protection, distrust of police due to entrenched discrimination and discriminatory policing, and desire for peer respect and blessing, as well as involvement in criminal activities.

The solutions to addressing mass shootings in the United states of america are the same as those identified to foreclose other forms of gun violence and include a national arrangement of licensing and registration along with comprehensive groundwork checks.

Activism against gun violence

Jaclyn Corin is an activist against gun violence. She is a survivor of the schoolhouse shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, USA, on xiv February 2018 ©Amnesty International

Seventeen people died in the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, on fourteen Feb 2018. But this tragedy has united and inspired students from around the world to protest for gun reform. Many immature people in the United states of america now believe that stricter gun control tin can continue them safer and their youth gun reform grassroots motility is growing. Jaclyn Corin is a survivor of the school shooting and has become a gun reform activist:

The only way to heal was to accept action
Jaclyn Corin

"I never imagined it would happen to me. Parkland was labelled the safest customs in Florida, merely when tragedy hit and a mass shooting took identify at schoolhouse, I knew the only way to heal was to take activeness.

When my friends and I came together, we didn't take a plan. We literally started work on a living room floor. Existence immature worked in our favour. We weren't adults trying to gauge what worked for young people and nosotros weren't asking for permission. Other kids from beyond the nation saw what we were doing and felt they could practice it too.

Being survivors of a schoolhouse shooting meant people listened to us. We were angry and loud. The reaction to what happened to united states of america helped build our movement faster than nosotros could have imagined. It is amazing to see the impact nosotros're having, simply in that location's also a sense of guilt, as this has arisen out of something and so horrible.

We created March For Our Lives because our friends who lost their lives would have wanted usa to take action. Nosotros're doing it for them.

The kids who are doing something to make a divergence inspire me – the daughter who is running for school board, or the others running March For Our Lives. Information technology's the people and the present that inspires me."

How can states stop gun violence?

Finer implemented gun regulation and violence prevention projects can stop the carnage.

As a first step, states should recognize firearm violence every bit a threat to people'due south human rights, in detail their rights to life, to physical integrity and security of person, and to health.

Gun regulation and gun licences

States tin can set up some basic systems to regulate how private individuals tin can own and utilise firearms and ammunition to foreclose them from using firearms to abuse human rights. The United nations has prepare up international guidelines that states can put in place to incorporate into national laws on firearms control.

These international standards recommend prohibiting any possession of firearms without a licence; that states should register all firearms; and that unlicenced possession should be treated every bit a law-breaking.

A firearms licence should exist subject to sure criteria existence met. For case, the applicant should undergo a comprehensive background check to identify any adventure factors, such as prior criminal record – especially for violent behaviour in the abode or community; history of gender-based, sexual or domestic violence; and history of problematic use of drugs/alcohol, emotional problems, mental health conditions and other circumstances which heighten the risks of the impairment to self or others using firearms. Gun licences should be time-limited and training on how to use the weapon should be mandatory. The number and type of weapons that an individual tin possess should too be strictly limited in line with the principles of necessity and credible justification.

Firearms and ammunition which correspond an unacceptable level of run a risk to public prophylactic, including those probable to cause excessive or unintended injury, such as fully automatic firearms, semi-automatic assault rifles, semi-automatic shotguns and semi-automatic submachine-guns, must be prohibited for use by private individuals.

To avoid fuelling the illicit trade in and possession of firearms, states must accept proactive measures to brand certain that all stocks of firearms and related armament, including those for use by military and law enforcement personnel, every bit well as those held by dealers, are kept securely.

New Zealanders meeting for the National Remembrance Service on 29 March 2019 following the Christchurch terror attack, Christchurch, New Zealand. Fifty people were killed and dozens injured when a gunman opened burn at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques on 15 March. The assault was the worst mass shooting in New Zealand'south history ©Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images

How can states assist communities with high levels of gun violence?

Where patterns of firearm possession and use atomic number 82 to chronic insecurity, states accept the obligation to protect life and ensure security for all through human rights-compliant law enforcement, customs interventions, and tightening of regulations on firearms possession and use.

Initiatives should focus on those at most risk of perpetrating and being victims of gun violence – often young males growing upward in deprived urban neighbourhoods.

Long-term, adequately funded, evidence-based projects, tailored towards specific social, economic and cultural contexts, and working in partnership with the affected communities, are needed to reach sustained reductions in firearm violence.

Stopping gender-based gun violence

In 2017, some 87,000 women were intentionally killed effectually the globe. More than than half of them, 50,000 (58%) were killed past intimate partners or family members.

This ways that globally, 137 women are killed past a member of their family every single day. Of the women intentionally killed in 2017, more than than a tertiary (thirty,000) were killed past their current or one-time intimate partner.

Firearms are the principal machinery of intimate partner killings and intimidation in countries with high rates of firearm ownership.

Studies in the USA indicate that the presence of a gun in the home increases the take a chance of women existence killed past intimate partners.

Moreover, the presence of a firearm tin accept a disempowering and demoralizing result on women and be used for psychological and/or sexual coercion.

States should prefer strict laws and practices to prohibit gun possession for those individuals that have a history of violence towards a family unit member or intimate partner.

Does gun reform work?

Yep, gun reform works. About all states regulate gun acquisition, possession and use in some form. Most do this by licencing users and registering firearms.

Gun reform works in parts of the world where at that place are strict controls on access to firearms and well enforced firearms regulations. This is the instance for much of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia. For example, in Japan, Southward Korea and Singapore, the rate of firearm violence is extremely low.

What does Amnesty practise almost gun violence?

We at Amnesty International take been focusing our piece of work on domestic gun reform and gun violence prevention by campaigning for regulations on firearm apply and possession.

We support the establishment of evidence-based violence reduction programmes in communities where there is a persistently high level of firearms violence.

We're too working to end firearm exports to crunch zones where arms risk being used for serious homo rights violations. For example, nosotros investigated international arms exports to the Saudi arabia/UAE-led coalition and uncovered how artillery were being diverted for use by militias to commit man rights abuses in the Yemeni civil war. For states parties, supplying arms for use in the Yemen conflict violates the global Arms Trade Treaty; these transfers also alienation Eu police, and in many instances supplier countries' domestic law.

Along with several other organizations, we successfully campaigned for a global Arms Merchandise Treaty (ATT) which became international law in 2014. Every state that has ratified the ATT must follow strict rules on international arms transfers.

We go on to campaign for the effective implementation of the ATT which will stem the flow of weapons that fuel violations in conflicts, atrocities and country repression around the world. The ATT can salve lives and protect people's human rights.

Governments have a legal obligation to protect the right to life, and accordingly a responsibility to protect people from firearms violence. We take to remind them of their duty by demanding gun reform.

You can stand up upwards and remind our leaders of their obligation to go along us safe. Yous tin can play a crucial function in campaigning and protesting against gun violence. By getting involved, you lot tin can make it clear to governments that poor regulation of the possession and use of guns leads to violence and that they must tackle this at present through strict controls on guns and effective interventions in communities suffering high levels of gun violence.

You lot have the power to tell governments that by using gun laws, we can all live safely and without fear – which is our right.

Cheque if your state is signed upwards to the Artillery Trade Treaty and tell them to practice then now if they aren't!

Governments take a legal obligation to protect the right to life, and appropriately a responsibleness to protect people from firearms violence. We have to remind them of their duty by demanding gun reform.

You lot can stand up and remind our leaders of their obligation to keep us condom. You can play a crucial role in campaigning and protesting confronting gun violence. By getting involved, yous can arrive clear to governments that poor regulation of the possession and use of guns leads to violence and that they must tackle this at present through strict controls on guns and effective interventions in communities suffering loftier levels of gun violence.

You have the power to tell governments that by using gun laws, we tin can all live safely and without fearfulness – which is our right.

Check if your land is signed up to the Artillery Trade Treaty and tell them to do so now if they aren't!