The United States has a problem with gun violence.

BUSH: We hold the victims in our hearts.

CLINTON: Perhaps we may never fully understand it.

“A man with a semiautomatic weapon.”

We talk about it after mass shootings. But it's much larger, and more complicated than

those debates allow.

Here's what you need to know about the state of gun violence in America.

It's true that the US sees many more mass shootings than these other developed countries.

Between 2000 and 2014, there were 133 mass shootings in public, populated places. That's

excluding gang violence and terrorism.

Of course, the US is a much larger country, but if you adjust for population size, it

still ranks higher. Of these countries, Finland is next, with just 2 shootings over 14 years,

but a much, much smaller population.

And this type of tragedy seems to be happening more often in the US. Each of these squares

represents a public mass shooting with 4 or more fatalities. Before 2011, they happened

6 months apart on average, but since then, only 2 months go by between them.

OBAMA: I hope and pray that I don't have to come out again during my tenure as president

to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances.

That was October 1, 2015. And just about 2 months later.

OBAMA: Yesterday, a tragedy occurred in San Bernardino. Our first order of business is

to send our thoughts and prayers to the families of those who've been killed.

Public mass shootings get all the attention because they're often so indiscriminate,

but the truth is mass shootings are unlike most gun deaths in America.

Here's how it breaks down:

According to the most recent data, 92 people are killed with guns every day on average.

About 30 of those are homicides of which maybe 1.5 at most can be considered part of mass shootings.

Most of those killed, 58 people a day, are suicides. The rest are accidental shootings,

police actions, and undetermined incidents.

Those suicides, they show up in international comparisons, too. These are the 10 countries

ranked highest on Human Development by the UN. The US has the highest suicide rate among them,

and this darker bar shows how many of those are with guns.

Some people think suicide isn't really relevant to the gun issue.

LOTT: To go and think some type of gun control regulations that are being talked about are

going to stop somebody from committing suicide when there are so many other ways to commit suicide.

But the methods that people use are important because suicide attempts often stem from temporary

crisis. The vast majority of people who survive suicide attempts don't end up dying from

suicide. But guns make it nearly impossible to get that second chance.

The victims of gun suicides are overwhelmingly men, and mostly white.

And the rate of gun suicides has been increasing in the US.

At the same time, the rate of gun

homicides has been decreasing, especially since the 90s when crime rates in general

were higher.

But if you compare the US to other developed countries, it doesn't look like good news.

These are homicides adjusted for population size. The US would probably have a higher

homicide rate even without guns,

but you can see how gun violence pushes that rate far beyond the other countries here.

The victims of these shootings, they're not the ones you often see on the national

news. They're disproportionately young black men.

SHUNDRA ROBINSON: You guys can leave here and go on with your lives, but we gotta go home

to empty rooms. Because our children's lives were taken away by people who should

not have had guns anyway.

One possible explanation is that US simply has more crime than those other countries.

But if you set aside homicides for a moment and look rates of burglary, or assault, you

don't see the same spike that you see with homicide.

It's not that America has much more crime. It's that crime in the US is much more lethal.

Altogether, the number of gun deaths in the US from 2000 to 2013 exceeds the number of

Americans killed by AIDS, by illegal drug overdoses, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,

and terrorism, combined.

It should be clear by now that this level of gun violence is a uniquely American problem

among the developed world. And here's one reason why.

There are a ton of guns in the US. This chart shows the estimated number of guns by country.

It's adjusted for population size and it's still not even close.

OREGON SHOOTER'S FATHER: The question that I would like to ask is how on Earth could

he compile 13 guns? How can that happen?

If you take a look back at the 10 countries with the highest levels of human development,

you can see that it's relatively really easy to get a gun in the US. All of the other

countries require a license to purchase most guns and those purchases are recorded into

an official registry. To get that license people have to state a reason for why they

want a gun, and in most countries, they have to pass a safety test and are required by

law to store their guns safely.

In part because of its lax laws, there are well over 300 million guns in the US and counting.

This chart doesn't reflect private sales but it shows the number of background checks,

which all federally licensed dealers have to run. It suggests the demand for guns has

been increasing steeply since Barack Obama took office.

So we've looked at gun deaths and at gun ownership. This chart puts them together.

It shows that among highly developed countries, the more guns in a country, the more gun deaths.

You can see that countries like Switzerland, which have relatively more guns than a country

like the Netherlands, also have a higher gun death rate. And here's the US.

Likewise, US states with more guns have more gun homicides. There are outliers like Idaho,

which has high rates of gun ownership but low rates of gun murders. But overall, there's

a correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates, and that relationship has held up in

studies that control for things like poverty, unemployment, and crime.

The correlation between gun ownership and gun deaths is even stronger for suicides.

It make sense. Depression with a gun is more dangerous than depression without one.

Likewise, fights, domestic disputes, road rage, drunkenness, all much more dangerous

with a gun than without.

That said, you might need different policies to keep guns away from potential mass shooters

than you'd need to keep them out of inner city gangs or out of the hands of someone

who might hurt themselves.

America doesn't have a gun problem, it has several of them.