Back at the end of 2002 Michael Moore explored the cult of guns in the United States in his documentary Bowling For Columbine. My greatest takeaway from the movie was that despite having a lower gun-ownership rate per capita than our neighbor to the north, The United States’ rate of gun violence was greater by several orders of magnitude. (The data was later fact checked and found accurate by Deanna Grant.)

That’s why when Mary Jo passed Max Fisher and Josh Keller’s What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer in The New York Times along to me, I was skeptical.

Take a look at the chart above. Canada appears to have about 32 guns per 100 citizens. The United States about 89 per 100.

Did the numbers change so drastically between 2002 and 2015?

Fisher and Keller begin:

When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film. But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings? Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad. These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion. The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

Read that again slowly. The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

Not mental health. Not video games. Not racial diversity. Not immigration. Not societal violence. Not any other factor.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries. This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence. Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common. But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

Fisher and Keller conclude with this 2015 tweet from British journalist Dan Hodges:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

Looking back now I have to wonder if, as a nation, we bore that anguish because we had a Black president and we couldn’t conceive of giving up our precious guns when the race war was going to start any day? Is this the difference in 2018?

Or is the difference that we now have a president who is so tone-death that he has actually tried to make the mass murder in Parkland, Florida, all about himself and his struggle to stay in office?

Or has a generation that didn’t even exist when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked havoc in Columbine become old enough, savvy enough, articulate enough and flat out pissed off enough to open the windows and have their collective Howard Beale moment?