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By German Lopez

Good morning. Once again, America is confronting the aftermath of a gun massacre.

Monterey Park, Calif., on Sunday.Mark Abramson for The New York Times

American tragedy

A gunman shot to death 10 people and injured at least 10 others on Saturday at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, Calif., a city of about 60,000 people east of Los Angeles. He opened fire as many people in the city, which is predominantly Asian, were celebrating the eve of Lunar New Year.

Many of the victims were in their 50s and 60s, said Sheriff Robert Luna of Los Angeles County, though he did not identify them.

The gunman, whom the authorities identified as 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, is believed to have then gone to a dance hall in the neighboring city of Alhambra. But he fled, according to the authorities. Officers later found him in a parked van after he reportedly shot himself to death.

The gunman used “a magazine-fed semiautomatic assault pistol” that is probably not legal in California, Luna said. His motives remain under investigation.

“Gun violence needs to stop,” Luna said. “There’s too much of it.”

This kind of mass shooting has become tragically common in the U.S.; what would be a rare horror in any other developed country is typical here. Yet the cause is no mystery. America has an enormous amount of guns, making it easier for someone to carry out a deadly shooting.

It is a point this newsletter has made before: All over the world, there are people who argue, fight over relationships, suffer from mental health issues or hold racist views. But in the U.S., those people can more easily obtain a gun and shoot someone.

The data bears out this explanation. The U.S. is a clear outlier for both civilian gun ownership and number of gun deaths among the world’s developed countries, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:

Ownership rates are for 2017 and homicide rates are for 2018. | Source: Small Arms Survey

If anything, the chart, which uses data from 2017 and 2018, understates America’s problem. The U.S. rate of gu

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