Gun violence in the United States has long been a major crisis. Rates of firearm deaths are nine times greater here than they are in Canada and over seventy times the rate of Great Britain. (And with heavily armed soldiers operating in nearly 150 countries each year, Americans are disproportionately even more likely to kill with a bullet than they are to be killed by one.) This is a country so violent that its police officers, the people supposedly employed to protect us from things like gun violence, kill more of us each year than the total number of homicide victims in England and Wales.

In recent years, this emergency has finally started receiving the widespread attention it deserves. The urgency is driven by mass shootings, which understandably receive outsized media attention. But two-thirds of gun fatalities are suicides, and even among homicides, mass shootings account for fewer gun deaths than domestic violence or police killings. And while the number of mass shootings is accelerating at a terrifying pace, the overall gun fatality rate remains far below what it was in the 1970s or the early 1990s — although it’s been rising in recent years.

None of these clarifications should lessen the sense of emergency around gun violence. In fact, while mass shootings may be statistically unrepresentative, they also convey a message that is both accurate and deeply moral: none of us should feel safe from gun violence. The impotent government responses that follow each public massacre give us a sense of existential dread at being trapped in a broken political system hijacked by a far-right minority.