| After an assailant opened fire on students praying at a church in Minneapolis, parents, local officials, Democrats and even a Fox News host called for stricter gun laws. “I beg you, I ask you to please pray but don’t stop with your words,” said Matthew DeBoer, the principal of Annunciation Catholic School, where the students from the shooting attend. “Let’s make a difference and support this community, these families, these teachers. Never again can we let this happen.” “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said. “These kids were literally praying. … They should be able to go to school or church in peace, without the fear or risk of violence.” “We’re going to have a conversation of freedom versus protecting children,” Fox News host Trey Gowdy, who previously was a gun rights advocate as a congressman, said on TV. “We’ve got to decide whether or not we want to live like this.” “The American political sphere allows this to happen over and over and over again,” parent Brooks Turner, whose 4-year-old daughter had lain flat and covered her eyes during the shooting, told The Washington Post. “There’s a problem of a culture of violence in America.” A culture of acceptance of gun violence As President Donald Trump pitches himself and Republicans as tough on crime by sending troops into Democratic-led cities, he’s stayed silent so far on what could stop gun violence. Republicans have long argued that guns don’t kill people and that time is better spent dealing with mental health issues from which shooters often suffer. However, there have been fewer prominent Republicans advocating for gun rights in the aftermath of the Minneapolis shooting than after previous such events. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’s studying the role of antidepressants on violence, a baseless medical assertion that also jumps ahead of what police know about the Minneapolis shooter. (“I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” an angry Democratic senator from Minnesota, Tina Smith, posted on social media in response to Kennedy.) Last year, the U.S. surgeon general in President Joe Biden’s administration declared the country’s gun violence a public health crisis. A majority of Americans (61 percent) say it is too easy to get a gun in this country, and 58 percent favor stricter gun laws, a 2023 Pew Research Survey found. Here are more facts about gun violence in America. America has more gun violence than any other developed nation: And it’s going up. The Post found there have been at least 30 mass shootings a year during the past few years. Stricter gun laws can save lives: Emerging research shows that mass shootings are more likely to happen in states with looser gun laws, according to Harvard University. Still, other studies find it’s hard to definitively say what policy would have stopped mass killers. Police say the shooter in Minneapolis bought firearms legally. But stricter gun laws can reduce gun violence overall, experts say. A 2023 study from Princeton researchers found that some gun-control laws, including background checks and waiting periods, save lives. States with those laws and others reduced gun deaths by nearly 4,300 over two decades, they estimated. The study’s co-author told the New York Times at the time that “the challenge of gun violence is not intractable, and in fact we have just lived through a period of enormous progress that was driven by public policy.” The Supreme Court and Congress are largely gun-friendly: In 2022, the conservative majority on the court struck down one of the nation’s oldest and most restrictive gun-control laws in New York. It opened the door for lawsuits to unravel other blue-state restrictions on who can carry guns in public. The court also struck down a bump stock ban, which was one of the few gun-control efforts the federal government implemented after a mass shooting. The court upheld a Biden-era rule making it harder to buy kits online to make guns. Congress hasn’t passed major gun control legislation since the 1990s and has allowed a decades-old assault weapons ban to expire. It did approve two smaller gun bills during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. Red states have become much more friendly to guns in recent years: While Americans say they want stricter gun laws, Pew finds that most policies are polarizing. Except for one: Majorities in both parties want permits for people to carry concealed firearms in public. That includes 60 percent of Republicans. Yet a majority of states allow people to carry concealed guns without a permit, most of them Republican-controlled. This is a recent development: In 2010, just two states allowed this, Everytown for Gun Safety found. Republicans in two states have strengthened gun-control laws after major shootings there: Florida in 2018, after the Parkland high school shooting, and Tennessee in 2023, after a school shooting. (Although just this week, a Tennessee court ruled that guns can be carried in state parks and made it harder to arrest people with guns.) | 
