By Peter Squires

There are generally reckoned to be over a billion firearms (small arms) in the world, that figure growing by around ten million per year.  Guns are durable, they last.  The overwhelming majority of the global stock of guns are owned by civilians.  Holdings by military and policing agencies account for less than a quarter of global small arms.  Given the preponderance of firearms in civilian hands, and the power they confer on owners, it is important to understand of how the proliferation of firearms impacts societies, communities, families and individual lives. Strikingly, almost 95% of the world’s guns are held by men.  There is an issue right there, which a number of the book’s chapters address, including concerns about gun ownership in the home and intimate partner homicide. On the other hand, establishing a women’s market for guns, in the face of a largely saturated masculine market (the average American gun owner has seven firearms), has been a priority of the gun industry for many years.

Such considerations are partly where this book began.  For a long time – and until fairly recently – guns, gun violence and gun studies occupied a fairly narrow space in American criminology. Research could often be highly partisan, focused largely on statistical correlations between levels of gun ownership and rates of gun violence, assessing the effectiveness of policies targeting firearm availability, restricting gun certain categories of people (criminals, domestic abusers) from gun ownership or assessing the impact of sentencing enhancements for crimes committed with a firearm.  Even so, in virtually all modern developed societies, including the USA, firearm suicides far outnumber firearm homicides, a fact that is often overlooked.

As the international community began to take increasing interest in regulating small arms, the weapons responsible for the greater number of violent killings, the types of research, and the questions asked about firearm proliferation, crime and disorder began to evolve.  Researchers travelled upstream from the crime scene to investigate contexts of firearm supply (and suppliers) and weapon trafficking; sociologists and anthropologists explored differing gun use ‘cultures’, and the various demands for weapons (for sport, for criminal enterprise or, increasingly, for personal safety) while psychologists explored the meanings guns had for people, the discrete pleasures of ownership, the community of like-minded individuals and the politics which followed.

Of course, the world’s billion firearms are not equally distributed, despite having only around 4% of the world’s population, the USA has some 46% of the world’s firearms. U.S. residents own more guns than the next 25 top-ranked gun-owning countries combined.  This is a good reason for the rich diversity of the field of academic ‘gun studies’ developing in the USA, with which my book seeks to engage, but hardly the end of the story.  

In the first place the ‘most armed’ societies are not necessarily the most violent ones.  All the countries experiencing the highest rates of chronic gun violence are located in the ‘Global South’ where the legacies of imperialism, racism, weaponisation and armed frontier living are still evident.  Parts of South and Central America, especially Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, the Caribbean (in particular Honduras, Jamaica, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago – as featured in the book) and parts of Africa, notably South Africa, experience the highest rates of gun enabled violence.  Today, the role of illegal drug supply, and conflict between gangs and cartels inevitably exacerbate gun violence levels. In such societies poverty and inequality, and the existence of contraband economies also serve to increase rates of gun violence.  Likewise, wars and regional conflicts facilitate illegal gun supplies, surplus military weapons disappearing into trafficking corridors, once the fighting stops.

Beyond questions relating to chronic, almost ‘routine’ gun violence, the phenomenon of mass shootings, even though they account only for a small fraction of gun deaths in the USA (less than 2%) are occasionally capable of ‘moving the policy dial’ on gun control. Partly because of the scale of such incidents, their randomness, the media coverage and public outrage as well as who gets shot (especially children, ‘innocent’ civilians, bystanders).  So far, however, not in the USA. Often overlooked in debates about firearm violence are people suffering long-term life-changing injuries as a result of being shot, even victims whose bodies still contain bullets.  They can often outnumber the killed by a factor of five or six.

In some countries mass shootings have prompted significant root-and-branch reform of gun laws, in the USA, by contrast, security consultants specialising in school lockdown drills market their services to school districts.  Significantly, the publication of this book in late March 2026, will be bracketed by the 30^th anniversaries of the Dunblane School Shooting (16, five-and-six-year-old, children killed along with their teacher) and the Port Arthur mass shooting in Tasmania, where 35 people were killed.

In both countries significant gun law reforms followed gaining international attention. Britain went on to ban the civilian possession of most handguns; Australia initiated a federal buy-back of many types of semi-automatic rifles.  While Australia had no further mass shootings for almost thirty years, Britain experienced two more in Cumbria and Plymouth. Both incidents raised profound questions about police firearm licensing and accreditation processes.  Indeed, most mass shooting outrages involve legally held weapons and, as one of our chapters reveals, many of these begin as domestic incidents which spill out of control into the streets.

Media scholars have detected a phenomenon they refer to as the ‘shooting cycle’ which often accompanies a mass shooting incident.  Initially 24-hour rolling news provides detailed coverage, anger, recriminations and promises of ‘never again’.  Reforms are urgently called for; people commit their support.  As the days pass, the issue slips from front pages and news headlines, the urgency disappears, support for new policies falters in the face of concerted opposition. All impetus gone, public opinion settles back to what it was before, perhaps until ‘next time’.

While Britain and Australia passed new significant legislation after the gun atrocities they experienced in 1996, both have been caught up in a longer-term shooting cycle, a kind of institutional complacency.  The signs were there for anyone who cared to look.  While one narrative of the Bondi (December 2025) shooting drew attention to the antisemitic motivations of the attackers, another detailed the institutional ‘complacency’ surrounding Australian firearms regulation, the fragmentation of the 1996 National Firearms agreement, apparently lax administration of the gun laws, political pressure on behalf of the Australian gun lobby to weaken existing regulations, new weapon technologies (such as 3D printing, ‘ghost guns’, convertible and composite weapons, the after-market in firearm components and the role of the internet – pressures that all societies are facing) and significantly increasing rates of civilian gun ownership.

Similar concerns have been raised in respect of the UK, recurring concerns about the policing of firearms and weapon licensing, significant gaps, contradictions and ambiguities in firearms laws of “labyrinthine complexity” rendered anachronistic and repeatedly outpaced by new firearm technologies, gun marketing and weapon trafficking practices, and complemented by forensic science intelligence support systems recently described as profoundly ‘dysfunctional’ and barely fit for purpose.

In a weaponizing world awash with guns and similar small weapon technologies, democracy, justice and public safety rest upon our ability to regulate them effectively.  This book raises many of the questions we need to be reflecting upon in trying to do just that.

The above reflection arises from: Handbook on Gun Violence and Society edited by Peter Squires

Handbook on Gun Violence and Society is available to read as a Hardback and eBook. Learn more