The Exception:
America Regulates Everything Except the Thing Killing Its Children

Let me tell you what it takes to legally drive a car in the United States.

You have to be a certain age. You have to take a written test. In most states, you need between 30 and 70 hours of supervised driving practice. You take a road test with an examiner sitting in the passenger seat watching you parallel park and signal your turns. If you pass, you get a license. You have to register the vehicle. You have to insure it. Your license expires, and you have to renew it. If you drive drunk or reckless, they take it away. If your eyesight goes, they take it away. If you rack up enough violations, they take it away.

That's for a car. A thing whose primary purpose is transportation.

Now let me tell you what it takes to buy a gun in 29 American states as of 2025.

You walk into a store. You're 18 or 21, depending on the weapon. A background check runs—takes a few minutes, sometimes instant. If nothing pops, you walk out with a firearm. No training. No test. No license. No registration. No insurance. No renewal. No proof that you know how to load, unload, store, or safely handle the thing you just bought. In 29 states, you can now carry that gun concealed in public without a permit of any kind. They call it "constitutional carry." I call it the exception.

Because guns are the exception to everything in this country. They're the one product we refuse to regulate with the same basic common sense we apply to literally everything else.

The Number That Should End Every Argument

In 2024, 44,447 people died by firearms in the United States. That's one person every 12 minutes. An entire classroom worth of people, every single day, for 365 days.

Of those, 27,593 were suicides. People who picked up a gun in their worst moment and never got a second chance. Another 15,364 were homicides. And roughly 450 were accidents—the toddler who found a loaded gun under a couch cushion, the teenager showing off to a friend, the hunter who didn't know the chamber was loaded because nobody ever taught him to check.

I need to pause on the suicide number because people skip past it. Sixty-two percent of all gun deaths in America are suicides. Gun suicides hit a record high in 2024—the fourth record year in a row. Guns were used in more than half of all suicides in the country, the highest share in at least a quarter century. And here's the thing about suicide attempts with firearms: the fatality rate is roughly 85 percent. For drug overdose, the most common method, it's less than 3 percent. A gun doesn't give you a second chance. A locked cabinet, a waiting period, a mandatory safety course—any barrier between a person's worst moment and a loaded weapon saves lives. We know this. We have the data. We just don't do anything with it.

What Every Other Country Figured Out

I want to be careful here because I am not interested in telling Americans they should be like other countries. I'm interested in showing you what other countries did when they had the same problem, and what happened after.

Let me start with Australia, because it's the clearest example.

On April 28, 1996, a gunman walked into a tourist site in Port Arthur, Tasmania and killed 35 people. It was the worst mass shooting in Australian history. Twelve days later—twelve days—every state and territory government in Australia agreed to uniform gun control laws. They banned semiautomatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns. They bought back 700,000 firearms from civilians at market value. They required licensing, registration, a "genuine reason" for ownership, mandatory safety courses, secure storage, and a 28-day waiting period.

The result? In the 18 years before Port Arthur, Australia had 13 mass shootings. In the 22 years after, they had zero. Gun suicides dropped. Gun homicides dropped. The overall firearm death rate fell from 2.7 per 100,000 to well below 1.

Australia didn't ban guns. People still own them. Farmers have them. Sport shooters have them. Hunters have them. What Australia did was decide that owning a gun comes with responsibilities—the same way driving a car does, the same way practicing medicine does, the same way operating heavy machinery does. They made it a privilege that requires proving you're capable and responsible. That's it.

Now look at the rest of the developed world.

The United States has a gun death rate 7.5 times higher than Canada. Thirty-nine times higher than Germany. Three hundred and forty times higher than the United Kingdom. Eight hundred and sixty times higher than Japan.

Every single one of those countries requires a license to own a firearm. Every one requires training. Every one requires registration. Every one requires a background check. Most require you to demonstrate a legitimate reason for ownership.

In Japan, you have to take a class, pass a written test, pass a shooting range test, undergo a mental health evaluation, and submit to a police background check that includes interviewing your neighbors and family. You have to store the gun and ammunition in separate locked cabinets and allow police to inspect them annually. Japan has a population of 125 million people. In 2022, they had six gun deaths. Six. For the entire year.

I'm not saying the US should become Japan. I'm saying that the distance between "zero requirements" and "basic safety standards" is not a slippery slope. It's common sense that every other developed nation on Earth has already figured out.

The Exception to the Exception

Here's what gets me. We already regulate everything else that can kill people. We regulate it extensively, and nobody calls it tyranny.

You need a license to cut someone's hair. All 50 states require it. You need between 1,000 and 2,100 hours of training at a cosmetology school. You take a written exam and a practical exam. Your license has to be renewed, usually every two years. You can lose it for sanitation violations.

To cut hair.

You need a license to go fishing. Every state requires one. You need a license to fly a recreational drone that weighs more than 250 grams. You need to register a boat. You need a permit to add a bathroom to your own house. You need certification to handle food in a restaurant. You need a license to sell real estate, give a massage, spray pesticides, drive a forklift, or train somebody's dog in certain states.

But a gun? A thing specifically designed to fire a projectile that kills what it hits? In 29 states, you need nothing. Walk in, pass a quick check, walk out armed. And in private sales—which account for roughly 22 percent of all gun transactions—you don't even need the background check. One in five guns sold in America changes hands with no verification of any kind.

I keep coming back to this because it makes no sense to me, and I grew up around guns. My family had them. People I respect own them. I am not sitting here telling you guns are evil or that the Second Amendment doesn't matter. I'm asking a much simpler question: why is the gun the only thing in America that gets a free pass?

What It's Doing to Our Kids

Firearms became the number one cause of death for American children and teenagers in 2020. Not cancer. Not car accidents. Not drowning. Guns. And they've held that position every year since.

In 2023, roughly 3,500 children and teens were killed by firearms. In 2024, there were 83 school shooting incidents—a record. Thirty-nine of those involved injuries or deaths. In 2025, there were at least 18 more school shootings resulting in casualties before the school year was even over.

I want to sit with what that means for a second. We have built an entire generation of children who practice "active shooter drills" the same way my generation practiced fire drills. They crouch in corners. They learn to barricade doors with desks. They're told to throw textbooks at a gunman if he gets into the classroom. Some schools have installed bulletproof panels in backpacks. There are companies selling armored inserts for kids' backpacks. A whole industry has grown up around the idea that the bullets are coming and the best we can offer our children is better hiding spots.

That's not a country with a gun problem. That's a country that has decided the gun problem is permanent.

And the thing that breaks my brain is that this doesn't happen anywhere else. Not in Canada, which has plenty of guns. Not in Switzerland, where military service puts a rifle in nearly every household. Not in Finland or Norway, where hunting is a way of life. Those countries have guns. They don't have children doing tactical drills in second grade.

The difference isn't the guns. It's the rules around them.

89 Percent

Here's the part of this story that should make you throw something.

Americans overwhelmingly support basic gun safety measures. This is not close. This is not controversial. The polling is so lopsided it would be embarrassing in any other democracy.

89 percent of Americans support universal background checks on all gun sales, including private sales and gun shows. That's not a Democratic number. That's 96 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of Republicans. 86 percent support red flag laws—temporary removal of firearms from people in crisis. 73 percent of Trump voters support strengthening background checks. 72 percent want the minimum age for assault-style weapons raised to 21.

Eighty-nine percent. In modern American politics, we can't get 89 percent of people to agree the sky is blue. But on background checks, the number is 89 percent, and has been for over a decade. Every poll. Every year. Same result. Bipartisan. Overwhelming.

And nothing happens.

After 20 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012—first graders, six and seven years old, shot multiple times at close range in their classroom—a bipartisan bill to expand background checks was introduced in the Senate. It got 54 votes. A majority. It failed anyway because 54 isn't 60, and the filibuster killed it. Four Republicans voted yes. Four Democrats voted no. The gun lobby won.

After 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, Congress finally passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It was the first major gun legislation in 28 years—since the 1994 assault weapons ban. And what did it do? It expanded background checks for buyers under 21. It closed the boyfriend loophole for domestic abusers. It created the first federal laws against gun trafficking. It funded some crisis intervention programs.

All good things. All modest. All about two decades too late. And the core problem—no federal licensing, no training requirement, no universal background checks, no registration—remains completely untouched.

Why Nothing Changes

I said at the top that this piece is not about being anti-gun or pro-gun. It's not. But I need to explain why 89 percent of the country can want something and still not get it, because that gap between public will and political action is the actual story here.

From 1998 to 2024, gun rights groups spent $233.7 million on federal lobbying. Gun control groups spent $37.1 million. That's a 6-to-1 ratio. In campaign contributions over the same period, gun rights groups gave $88.9 million to federal candidates. These aren't donations. They're insurance premiums. The return on investment is a Congress that won't act even when 89 percent of voters want them to.

But it's not just the money. It's the framing.

Every time someone brings up licensing, or training requirements, or universal background checks, the conversation immediately gets hijacked into a debate about the Second Amendment and whether the government is "coming for your guns." And the conversation dies. Every single time. It doesn't matter that nobody is proposing confiscation. It doesn't matter that licensing isn't a ban. It doesn't matter that Australia still has guns, Canada still has guns, Switzerland still has guns. The framing works. It shifts the debate from "should we have basic safety standards" to "should people be allowed to own guns at all," and since most Americans believe in the right to own firearms, the fear wins and nothing gets done.

Both sides exploit this. Republicans refuse to engage because the gun lobby is too powerful and the base too activated. Democrats use shootings for fundraising and outrage cycles but rarely spend real political capital on legislation that might actually pass. Neither side wants to touch it because both sides benefit from the status quo—Republicans get the donations and the votes, Democrats get the outrage and the donations. The kids doing active shooter drills don't have a lobbying budget.

The Data We're Not Allowed to Have

There's a detail in this story that most people don't know, and it might be the most damning one.

In 1996—the same year Australia transformed its gun laws in 12 days—the United States Congress passed the Dickey Amendment. It was lobbied for by the NRA and named after Republican congressman Jay Dickey of Arkansas. The amendment said that no CDC funding could be used to "advocate or promote gun control." That same year, Congress took $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—the exact amount previously allocated to firearms research—and redirected it to traumatic brain injury studies.

The amendment didn't technically ban research. It didn't have to. The message was clear enough. CDC funding for gun violence research dropped 96 percent. Academic publications on gun violence fell 64 percent. For over twenty years, the premier public health agency in the wealthiest country on Earth was effectively barred from studying one of the leading causes of death in that country.

Think about that. We spent two decades not studying the problem. On purpose.

If a disease were killing 40,000 Americans a year, we'd have a task force, a czar, a national strategy, and a billion-dollar research budget. We'd be running clinical trials and tracking every case. When it's guns, we passed a law making it politically dangerous for scientists to even look at the numbers.

Jay Dickey himself, before he died in 2017, publicly said he regretted the amendment. He said he wished he'd done more to promote research instead of blocking it. The man who wrote the law that killed the research told the world he was wrong. Congress hasn't changed the law.

In 2019, Congress finally appropriated $25 million for firearm injury research—23 years after they cut the funding. Between 2020 and 2022, the CDC and NIH awarded roughly $150 million combined. That sounds like a lot until you realize the NIH spends $6.5 billion a year on cancer research and $3.6 billion on HIV/AIDS. Gun violence, which kills more Americans than HIV/AIDS, gets a fraction of a fraction.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Gun violence costs the United States $557 billion every year. That's 2.6 percent of GDP. That's not a typo. Billion with a B.

That includes $2.8 billion in direct medical care. $30 million every day in police and criminal justice costs. Lost wages. Lost productivity. Employer costs for recruiting and training replacements for people who were shot. The armored backpacks and the bulletproof classroom panels and the active shooter training consultants and the school security guards and the metal detectors and the grief counselors and the therapy bills that follow families for decades.

Patients with firearm injuries see a 402 percent increase in medical spending per month after being shot. The ones who survive often can't work. The families of the ones who don't survive carry the economic and emotional wreckage for the rest of their lives. And the taxpayer picks up $12.6 billion of the tab every year—about $274,000 per gun death.

We're spending half a trillion dollars a year managing the consequences of a problem we refuse to address. We're subsidizing the cost of inaction and sending the bill to everyone.

What "Responsibility" Actually Looks Like

I want to be clear about what I'm not saying, because in this conversation, what you don't say matters as much as what you do.

I am not saying ban guns. I am not saying repeal the Second Amendment. I am not saying confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens. I am not saying only the military should have weapons. I don't believe any of those things, and I don't think most Americans do either.

What I'm saying is much simpler and much less dramatic: treat guns the way we treat cars.

Require a license. Make people take a safety course and pass a test—both written and practical—before they can purchase a firearm. Require registration so we know where the guns are, the same way we know where the cars are. Require insurance so the economic cost of misuse isn't borne entirely by taxpayers and victims. Require renewal, so the license doesn't last forever if circumstances change. Require safe storage, especially in households with children.

None of that is radical. All of it is standard practice in every other developed nation. All of it has data showing it saves lives. And 89 percent of Americans already want the first step—universal background checks.

The research exists. Johns Hopkins published a study showing that states with firearm purchaser licensing laws had 56 percent lower homicide rates. Connecticut saw a 40 percent reduction in firearm homicides after implementing a permit-to-purchase law. Missouri saw a 23 percent increase in firearm homicides after repealing theirs.

Licensing works. Training works. Background checks work. We know this. The question has never been whether we know what to do. The question is why we refuse to do it.

The Normalization

I talk to people in other countries about this, and they look at me the way you'd look at someone explaining that their house has been on fire for 30 years but nobody's called the fire department because the homeowners' association can't agree on a phone brand.

They don't understand it. Not the gun ownership—lots of countries have guns. They don't understand the resignation. The way we absorb a school shooting on a Tuesday and are back to arguing about something else by Thursday. The way the flags go to half-staff so often that I genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw them at the top. The way we've turned "thoughts and prayers" into a punchline because everybody knows it's the only thing that's coming.

I remember when Sandy Hook happened in 2012. Twenty first-graders. Six and seven years old. And I thought, for certain, that was the line. That was the thing so horrific, so impossible to look away from, that the country would finally act. And it didn't. The background check bill failed four months later. And something shifted after that—not just in policy, but in the national psyche. If dead first-graders couldn't change anything, then nothing could. And we started to accept that.

That acceptance is the real crisis. Not the guns. The acceptance. The way we've decided that 44,000 deaths a year is just the cost of being American. That our children practicing how to hide from a shooter is normal. That the number one killer of kids in this country is something we're not even going to seriously discuss regulating, because the conversation is too hard and the money is too strong and the politics are too broken.

The rest of the world watches us bury our children and wonders why we won't do what they did. And the honest answer—the one that should keep every member of Congress up at night—is that we've decided it's easier to buy smaller coffins than to fill out more paperwork.

What Comes Next

I don't have a neat ending for this. The data doesn't support one.

Twenty-nine states are moving in the wrong direction—loosening carry laws, removing permit requirements, making it easier, not harder, to walk around armed with zero training. Gun suicides are setting records every year. School shootings are setting records every year. And Congress is functionally paralyzed on the issue despite the clearest public mandate in modern American politics.

But I also know that every piece of progress in this country started with someone laying out the numbers and refusing to look away. That's what this project does. We count things. We compare them. We put them where people can see them.

So here are the numbers: 44,447 dead. One every 12 minutes. 400 million guns and zero federal licensing. 89 percent of Americans want change. Both parties take the money and do nothing. Twenty-three years of a research blackout on purpose. $557 billion a year in damage. And every other developed country on Earth looked at the same problem and fixed it while we taught our kids to hide under their desks.

This isn't a gun control argument. It's a math problem. And the math says we're failing.