1. In 1970, amid a national confrontation with the United States’ gun culture following the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the historian Richard Hofstadter struggled to make sense of how the country had become the ‘only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population.’ Writing for the magazine American Heritage, he expressed grave concern for a country ‘afloat with weapons – perhaps as many as 50 million of them – in civilian hands.’ If the US was afloat then, it’s flooded now.
A gun shop in Dunedin, Florida.
2. Half a century later, Americans own approximately 400 million firearms and the country carries the unfortunate distinction of being the only one in the world in which guns are known to be the leading cause of child and adolescent death. Today, Americans live with around 1.2 guns per capita – double that of the next-highest scoring country, Yemen. Despite having less than 5 percent of the global population, the US possesses nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Moreover, in recent years Americans have witnessed a surge in gun sales and gun-related deaths, unfolding against a backdrop of increasingly lenient gun laws across states.
against a backdrop of: 以……为背景
lenient: ['li:njənt] adj. 宽容的，这里理解为“纵容的”
3. In light of these developments, Hofstadter’s question takes on renewed urgency: ‘Why is it that in all other modern democratic societies those endangered ask to have such men disarmed, while in the United States alone they insist on arming themselves?’ How did the US come to be so terribly exceptional with regards to its guns?
in light of: 鉴于
4. From the viewpoint of today, it is difficult to imagine a world in which guns were less central to US life. But a gun-filled country was neither innate nor inevitable. The evidence points to a key turning point in US gun culture around the mid-20th century, shortly before the state of gun politics captured Hofstadter’s attention.
innate: ['i'neit] adj. 与生俱来的
5. Firearm estimates derived from gun sales and surveys indicate that, in 1945, there were somewhere around 45 million guns in the US at a time when the country had 140 million people. A quarter-century later, the number of guns doubled, whereas the population increased by a little less than 50 percent. By 2020, the number of guns had skyrocketed to nearly tenfold of its 1945 rate, while the population grew less than 2.5 times the 1945 number.
tenfold: adj. 十倍的
6. From the mid-20th century to today, guns also changed from playing a relatively minor role in US crime to taking centre-stage. Research by the criminologist Martin Wolfgang on Philadelphia’s homicide patterns from 1948 to 1952 reveals that only 33 percent of the city’s homicides involved a firearm. Today, 91 percent of homicides in Philadelphia feature a gun. In addition, opinion polls traced the evolution over the second half of the 20th century from Americans buying guns primarily for hunting and recreation to buying them for self-protection against other people. Together, these findings reveal a sea change in US gun culture between the mid-20th century and the present day.
7. So, how did this change happen? Until recently, it’s been difficult to say. The paucity of historical data on gun availability has left the origins of the country’s exceptional gun culture a mystery.
8. The US lacks a national gun registry, which is what most other countries use to count their gun supply. Yet, gun registration has been a hotly contested issue among US gun owners, who are concerned that state-mandated registration is a precursor to state-sponsored confiscation. Even though gun registries have been shown to reduce gun deaths, US law – specifically, the 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act passed under the president Ronald Reagan – prohibits the federal government from keeping a registry. As of today, only six US states maintain gun registries.
precursor: [pri:'kə:sə] adj. 先兆
9. Without a national gun registry, researchers have had to rely on surveys and gun proxies to investigate trends related to gun availability in the US. Most of the existing data on gun prevalence comes from a few questions on the General Social Survey (GSS), which began asking US households whether they own guns in 1973 and has continued asking them every other year since.
proxy: n. （测算用的）指代物
10. Due to its consistency over time and its nationally representative sample, the GSS is considered the gold standard of gun ownership data. It’s also been used to validate proxies for gun ownership that provide better estimates at local and state levels. Some of the most commonly used gun proxies come from hunting licences and Guns & Ammo magazine subscriptions per county, as well as the percentage of suicides with firearms per state.
validate: v. 确认……有效
11. But when a National Research Council committee reviewed the state of research on US guns and violence in 2005, it found that ‘answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data.’ The best data available start in 1973 and are ‘limited primarily to a few questions from the General Social Survey.’ As the committee rightly pointed out: