Les armes aux Etats-Unis (document en anglais)

Maria-Cassandra Van Eetvelde
Thipprakone Soumpholphakdy

Weapons in the US

Introduction :

Weapons play an important role in the United-States since guns are a big part of its culture. Gun ownership in the United-States is the highest in the world, and constitutionally protected by the Second Amendment of the United-States Constitution. Firearms are mainly used in the United-States for non-lethal reasons. However weapons could be used for recreational uses as well, such as target shootings. However, weapons are very disputed in that country : on the one hand, a big part of Americans want to keep guns in order to feel secure but on the other hand, many issues are linked with firearms like the “shooting of Columbine” in 1999. Thus, that’s the reason why we want to talk about it.

First of all, we’re going to talk about the relation between the Americans and firearms in their life. Then, we will broach deaths related to weapons. And finally, we will talk about the Americans’ opinions about gun laws.

1st graph : relation Americans/gun in their life

Taken from the PEW RESEARCH CENTER, this graph shows a survey of U.S adults conducted March 13-27 and April 4-18, 2017. The subject was the rate of Americans living in a gun ownership household, and the different parts of the pie chart are: American citizens who currently own a gun, Americans who live in a household without guns but with someone who does. By analyzing the pie chart, it is clear that the majority of people (57%) live in a household without guns, and plus, we have 30% of people who currently own a gun so 30% of people live in a household with a gun. Finally, only a minority of Americans doesn’t own a gun but is living with someone who does.

Then for the second part we have a bar chart, with 48% of people who grew up in a household with guns, 59% of people who say at least some of their friends own guns and then 72% of people who have shot a gun.

2nd graph : The outcome of the weapons’ policies in the United-States

Firstly, this document is a bar graph from statista.com. Basically, this chart shows us the number of gun deaths’ evolution in the United-States from 1990 to 2017.

First of all, the United-States is the country with the highest firearm death rate in the world and as we can see on the graph, there are approximately 30,000 deaths every single year due to firearms. In fact from 2000 and 2014, the number of deaths had gradually increased. This number sharply plunged between 2014 and 2017 as 39,773 deaths were registered in 2017 whereas there were 33,594 deaths registered in 2014. We can explain this rise by leaps and bounds due to numerous shootings in the United-States in 2017. For instance, there was the  “shooting in Las Vegas” or the “Sutherland Springs church shooting”, which happened the same year.

Moreover, 2017 is the deadliest year that the United-States has known since 1993. Indeed in 2017, the number of gun deaths almost reached 40,000 victims. From 1993 to 2000, the number of gun deaths dropped from 39,595 deaths in 1993 to 28,663 deaths in 2000.

3rd graph : Americans’ opinions about gun laws

        First, this document is a line graph from FiveThirtyEight’s website made in 2019. This chart is representing the Americans’ opinions about gun laws and the question is : “Do gun laws have to be stricter ?”. There are 3 different curves that represent those who want to have stricter laws (red curve), those who want to keep laws as they are (black curve) and those who want to get less strict laws (green curve).

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