Editor's Note: For the last few years, advocates for gun control have changed their focus. They no longer talk so much about banning weapons. Instead, they are calling for "universal background checks," to make sure firearms won't fall into the hands of criminals. Could that really make a difference? As part of our past "QEDecide" series, we put the question to one of the nation's leading experts: Daniel Webster, a respected professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. Here's what he said.

How big a problem is gun violence really? Isn’t it going down?

In the United States, firearms are used in about 31,000 deaths per year. About 11,000 of those deaths are due to homicides. Firearm homicide rates are about half as high now as they were in the early 1990s when homicide rates peaked in the U.S. But nearly all of that decrease occurred in the late 1990s. We’ve made relatively little progress since then and our firearm homicide rate is nearly 20 times as high as that of the average high-income country.

Why should we believe guns per se are the problem? Isn’t it true that guns don’t kill people—people kill people?

Guns are not the sole reason why the U.S. has such unusually high homicide rates, but our lax gun laws may be the most important determinant. Rates of non-lethal violent crime, adolescent fighting, and mental illness in the U.S. are average compared with other high-income countries.

