America’s Gun Crisis Is Not Inevitable Last Tuesday, a kindergarten teacher in Michigan practiced barricading her classroom door with five-year-olds. She made it a game—”let’s build a fort!”—while mentally calculating which corner offered the best cover from the windows. This is American exceptionalism in 2025: the only developed nation where teachers rehearse dying for their students. Forty-six thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight Americans died from firearms in 2023. Not statistics. Not talking points. People with dinner plans, mortgage payments, and kids who needed rides to soccer practice. An entire small American city, erased—every single year. Our peer nations watch us with the same bewildered horror we might feel watching a friend repeatedly drive drunk. They’ve solved this. We’ve mythologized it. Why do we live like this when nobody else does? The Second Amendment — Myth and Reality The Amendment That Wasn’t Always Sacred Here’s what the gun lobby doesn’t want