The US is familiar in many ways. I grew up with its television shows, music, and movies. The language is the same, and the culture, at first, resembles the UK. Yet, as the BBC’s former North America correspondent Jon Sopel observes in his book If Only They Didn’t Speak English, a shared language can be deceptive, hiding political, social, and cultural divides beneath a surface of apparent familiarity.1
Nowhere is the illusion of familiarity more jarring than in the US’s relationship with guns. I’ve lived in several countries outside the UK, including Kiribati, a remote Pacific island country of around 130 000 people. Yet nowhere have I felt as far from home as when I find myself wondering: is anyone here carrying a gun? It surfaces in unexpected moments: stopping at a highway gas station at night, walking through a shopping mall, or stopping for groceries. It’s a quiet, background awareness—an understanding that guns are not an abstract policy issue here but a daily reality.
Evidence behind the unease
My disquiet isn’t unfounded. The US has more guns than people: 120.5 guns per 100 people, which compares with 4.6 in England and Wales (and 0.8 in Kiribati).2 It has more mass shootings than days of the year: as of 20 November 2025 there had been 324 days and 374 mass shootings.3 Children and teenagers in the US are over 15 times more likely to die from gun related causes than their peers in 18 comparator high income nations from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.4 Women in the US have some of the highest gun related mortality worldwide.5 When disaggregated by state, US states have higher firearm mortality than most countries in the world, with higher rates in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and New Mexico than Guatemala, Mexico, or Honduras.5
Beyond the statistics are the human stories. Nelba Márquez-Greene is a gun safety advocate and community scholar at Yale University’s School of Public Health. Her daughter, Ana Grace, was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in 2012 that claimed 26 lives, most of them children 6-7 years old.67 After her daughter’s murder people told her, “Now you have a platform.” Her reply was, “I don’t want a platform. I want a daughter.”
Márquez-Greene shared this at a book launch for In Guns We Trust by the veteran journalist William J Kole.8 In his book Kole explores America’s relationship with guns, the constitutional second amendment “treated as if it were scripture,” and the profound religious and cultural forces that sustain it. The book maps a landscape where guns are so deeply woven into national identity that they transcend policy debate, becoming articles of faith.
Kole contrasts the vast, unregulated toll of gun violence in the US with the UK’s response to the massacre at Dunblane Primary School in 1996, where public outrage led to sweeping reform.9 He suggests that the difference is not policy capacity but political will and national identity, which in the US is driven and reinforced by white evangelical Christians. Political will is also powerfully shaped by the National Rifle Association, one of the most influential lobbying organisations in US history. Its reach has been bolstered by decades of messaging that equates gun ownership with freedom and patriotism.
Gun violence is a public health crisis that falls heavily on children.10 The US health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has made children’s health a central focus of his agenda. Yet the Make Our Children Healthy Again report published in October 2025 didn’t mention firearms once, even though they are the leading cause of death in children aged 1-17.1112 This omission reveals how deeply political motivation overrides public health evidence. It’s difficult to comprehend how a country that leads the world in medical innovation can remain inactive on a crisis rooted in preventable harm.
Beyond fear: rebuilding trust
Fear sits at the heart of this polarised issue. For many Americans, it’s been weaponised and sustained by narratives that misrepresent guns as the solution to violence rather than its cause. Over time that fear has been amplified by politics, profiteering, and polarisation, stoked by racialised and antimigrant rhetoric, until it’s become part of the culture itself.
The US seems unable, or perhaps unwilling, to protect its children from preventable injury and death. The problem isn’t a lack of solutions. Reducing harm will require more than policy: it will require rebuilding trust and rethinking the national identity that has come to equate freedom with firearms.
Fear is a powerful force in public health and politics. It feeds polarisation, narrowing the space for trust and evidence. Re-establishing trust—in each other, in institutions, in shared facts—is essential if gun violence is ever to be treated as the preventable crisis it is, rather than accepted as an inevitable cost of constitutional freedom.
Acknowledgments
I thank my UK and US mentors (Stefanie Friedhoff, Philip Landrigan, and Martin McKee) for their comments and feedback in preparing this piece, and Bill Kole for speaking with me about his book after the event.
Footnotes
-
Competing interests: None declared.
-
Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.
-
LH is a 2025-26 Harkness fellow based at Boston College and the Information Futures Laboratory at Brown University, supported by the Commonwealth Fund. The views presented here are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Commonwealth Fund or its directors, officers, or staff.
-
AI use: ChatGPT was used to improve readability. The arguments were developed independently by the author.
