| I had only been living overseas for a few months when I began to notice it: an unfamiliar feeling of safety. The streets around my favorite East London pub, The Hare, always reminded me of Boston's Allston neighborhood, which adjoins my hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts. They're both densely populated with lots of young people, graffiti, music, restaurants and night life overlaid by a kind of unpredictability about who or what you might see on any given day. The grit and randomness are tantalizing in a big city with millions of characters and souls, most of them peace-loving, but it can grow threatening, and sometimes violent. One thing I never had to fear, however, was the thought of someone walking into my pub with a gun. Firearms are strictly controlled in the UK. Most private handgun ownership was banned after 16 children and a teacher were gunned down at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in 1996. To my British friends, the massacre is a sad memory that spurred immediate action on guns. But today, after countless similar shootings, Americans are afraid. Almost 49,000 Americans died from gun injuries in 2021. US per capita firearm deaths are 47 times higher than in the UK, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Not surprisingly, four out of five US adults say they've taken measures to protect themselves and their families against gun violence, a new Kaiser Family Foundation survey found. About a third say they avoid crowds, bars and restaurants to stay safe. The fears are rooted in personal experience. We've all seen school shootings on the evening news. But according to Kaiser, most US adults — 54% — know someone involved in a gun-related incident; one in five has been threatened by someone with a gun or has had a family member killed by a gun. Another 4% have been injured by a gun personally. The psychic toll is worst for Black and Hispanic American adults, a third of whom worry "every day" or "almost ever day" that gun violence will be inflicted on themselves or their loved ones. It's in the back of everyone's mind. You get cut off in traffic, what's the first thing that comes into your head? "It's probably not worth getting shot." Owning a gun doesn't immunize you from fear. About a third of those Kaiser surveyed said that to protect themselves from guns, they'd bought one, a move that only increases the chances of gun injury. Citizens of most industrialized, wealthy countries don't have these preoccupations. In most major economies, gun homicide rates are a fraction of the US's. (Most have superior life expectancy rates and national health systems too, but let's keep moving.) Their people vote, open and operate businesses, get education, worship as they choose. They can, if they wish, follow a populist leader in a controversial, economically disastrous exit from a favorable international trading bloc. They do it all without firing once. There are exceptions, but the US constitutes the rule: Among its peers, it is the most violent country, with the most guns, the easiest access to guns and the least restrictions on the deadliest guns. I moved back to the US during the pandemic and am glad to be close to friends and family. But I miss those days of freedom from worry. About guns. — John Lauerman | 
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