By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

American Gun Violence Goes Global: How It's Spread Is Distorting and Diminishing U.S. Soft Power

Gun violence has become a staple of daily life in the United States. According to the Gun Violence Archive, the United States suffered over 600 mass shootings—defined as incidents in which at least four people were killed or injured, not including the gunman—every year between 2020 and 2023, or almost two every day. The physical and emotional toll is carried disproportionately by young people: gun violence is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of one and 17. A 2024 report by Everytown for Gun Safety (where I serve as a Survivor Fellow), the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, and the Southern Poverty Law Center found that an American young person knows, “on average, at least one person who has been injured or killed by a gun.”

Less understood, however, is the dangerous degree to which the United States is exporting its once-unique form of gun violence to the rest of the world. Last month, for instance, a 21-year-old gunman opened fire at his former school in Graz, Austria, killing 10 students in one of the deadliest days in the country since World War II. It soon emerged that the killer held “a significant passion” for researching U.S. school shootings, an Austrian police chief said; the 1999 school massacre had particularly inspired him in Columbine, Colorado.

The Austrian gunman is only one in a growing set of international perpetrators of targeted violence who an American. It has long been known that, in the U.S. context, school shootings are an epidemiological phenomenon. And the epidemic is now spreading beyond U.S. borders. In a 2024 report, Jason R. Silva, a leading scholar on gun violence, found that in a set of 35 countries relatively similar to the United States politically and economically, the number of public mass shootings more than doubled from the first to the second decade of the twenty-first century. “The greatest number of incidents,” Silva noted, “occurred in 2019 and 2020.” Research also shows that many of these incidents were directly linked to examples set by U.S. shooters.

Mass shootings now constitute a particularly bloody form of American foreign influence. By destabilizing U.S. allies, they threaten to undermine the United States’ global image—and foil its ability to advance its geopolitical aims.

 

Weapon of Mass Destruction

The United States remains the undisputed world leader in gun violence. Although its per capita death rates by firearm have remained relatively steady over the past 50 years, the United States has experienced a significant rise in mass shooting incidents. Between 2009 and 2018, for instance, there were 3,500 percent more school shootings in the United States than there were in Mexico, where there were the second most.

Understandably, foreign governments and media outlets frequently portray the United States as extraordinarily violent and lecture their U.S. counterparts on lax gun-safety laws. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2023, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas remarked that, when he engaged with non-American politicians, “almost every single time,” they posed two questions to him about the United States. The first was about U.S. political polarization, and the second was “about guns and the number of killings in our country.” “Only in the United States,” wrote a Danish foreign correspondent after the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, “does a seven-year-old attend school to learn about school shootings.” An editorial in France’s Le Monde newspaper read, “If there is any American exceptionalism, it is to tolerate the fact that schools in the United States are regularly transformed into bloody shooting ranges.”

But the perception that the United States remains a complete outlier when it comes to gun violence is increasingly wrong. The digital platform Wisevoter reported in 2023 that in Europe in particular, “the frequency and severity” of mass shootings have increased dramatically over the last decade.” The uptick in such incidents is not limited to Europe: targeted violence by firearm has become a growing threat worldwide.

Substantial research suggests that gun violence is contagious. Scholars of gun violence point to the so-called Columbine effect, in which the Columbine shooters created a “cultural script” for future attackers involving particular ideological, tactical, and even sartorial choices. Likewise, there is significant evidence that American perpetrators inspired foreign attackers. Columbine led directly to copycat attacks in Brazil, Canada, Finland, and Russia, claiming dozens of lives. One German criminologist told The Guardian, “The phenomenon of massacres by young people in schools in Germany has only existed since Columbine.”

In 2022, Silva and fellow researcher Adam Lankford found that “fame-seeking mass shooters who attacked outside the United States appeared more likely to have been influenced by American mass shooters than by perpetrators from all other countries combined.” Alexandre Bissonnette, for instance—a white supremacist who killed six people at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017—searched online for a “list of school shootings in the United States” in the runup to his attack. Less ideological shooters have also pointed to American predecessors. In Luton, England, a would-be school shooter who murdered three family members last September had extensively researched shootings and claimed that he hoped to eclipse the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, which killed 32.

In New Zealand, a white supremacist who murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019 aimed to become notorious in the United States and influence U.S. politics. A so-called accelerationist, he intended his attack to cause a tidal wave of anti-firearm sentiment in the United States that would speed the country’s collapse. “With enough pressure, the left wing within the United States will seek to abolish the US Second Amendment,” he wrote in a manifesto he published shortly before his attack, yielding “a fracturing of the United States along cultural and racial lines.”

The United States exports violence abroad more indirectly, too. U.S. social media platforms, which are less regulated than social media companies in other countries, play a role in glorifying violence, especially to disillusioned young men. In 2023, for instance, plaintiffs brought two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court against Google and X (which at the time was still called Twitter), alleging that the platforms had facilitated terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and Istanbul in 2017. After these lawsuits failed, foreign regulators began scrambling to contain this malign form of American influence. In 2024, Australia passed a law banning children under 16 from using social media, in response to concerns about children’s mental health and tech platforms’ role in stoking violent extremism. In 2022, the EU passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), which opened the door to massive fines against companies, including U.S. ones, that “spread illegal content such as hate speech, terrorist content, or child sexual abuse material.” X now faces a multipronged investigation into its compliance with the DSA’s obligation to counter “the dissemination and amplification of illegal content and disinformation” and faces significant fines or even a ban.

Guns being displayed at a National Rifle Association meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, April 2025

 

Fear Factor

In general, U.S. policymakers tend to interpret the United States’ gun violence problem—if they even believe it is a problem—as a purely domestic issue. But gun violence in the United States represents more than just a set of local tragedies. It has profound implications for U.S. soft power and foreign policy. For starters, the U.S. role in provoking violence abroad is becoming more concrete. In September 2024, for example, U.S. authorities arrested two U.S. citizens and charged them with leading an international online movement called the Terrorgram Collective, which had incited white supremacist attacks that killed and injured people in Slovakia and Turkey, both NATO allies.

And by exporting violence, the United States’ reputation is taking a beating. Governments in countries as varied as Australia, Germany, Uruguay, and Venezuela have, in direct response to U.S. mass shootings, issued warnings to their citizens about traveling to the United States; the Canadian government’s travel advisory warns those planning a U.S. trip to “familiarize yourself on how to respond to an active shooter situation.” One Morning Consult poll conducted in China in August 2022 found that 93 percent of respondents agreed that “fears of violent crime may cause them to reconsider” traveling to the United States.

Some gun-rich countries that chafe at the thought of more stringent gun control have blamed the United States’ gun culture for corrupting their own. After two back-to-back mass shootings in Serbia in 2023, for instance, a Serbian war veteran lambasted the way the United States had rewired his country’s cultural attachment to firearms. According to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, nearly half of the guns found at Mexican crime scenes and submitted for tracing between 2017 and 2022 were manufactured in the United States, and Mexico has sued U.S. weapons manufacturers to stem the flow of trafficked American guns.

The United States’ adversaries have also highlighted the country’s role as an exporter of violence. After a 2018 school shooting in occupied Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained that “it all started with the United States and their schools”; in 2022, the Russian Supreme Court even designated the “Columbine movement” of school-shooting worshippers a terrorist organization. Beijing, meanwhile, has repeatedly pointed to U.S. gun violence to criticize the United States writ large. In 2023, a foreign ministry spokesperson claimed that the United States “brings to other countries not democracy or progress of human rights, but... instability,” noting that high rates of gun violence in Mexico and Pakistan could be traced to exported U.S. weapons. Crucially, America’s gun violence undermines the legitimacy of its efforts to challenge other countries’ treatment of their citizens.

 

Merchant of Death

It was an American—the influential political scientist Joseph Nye—who popularized the concept of soft power. He explained the critical role that a culture’s attractiveness plays in drawing other nations into its sphere of influence. The United States was a great practitioner of soft-power politics long before Nye popularized the term: it arguably gained its edge after World War II, and its enormous sway over geopolitics and the global economy, thanks less to its military investments and more to the allure of its commercial, cultural, and ideological exports.

Policymakers eager to protect the United States’ reputation and influence need to seriously consider the impact of its new major export, gun violence. The most effective way for American leaders to address the problem would be to move more seriously to get gun violence under control at home. So far, the persistent murder of American schoolchildren has not prompted such reforms.

But perhaps geopolitical concerns will—and they should. America’s gun violence is driving agony and contempt among its allies and handing easy talking points to its rivals, both of which erode the United States’ advantages. With his cuts to cultural diplomacy, U.S. President Donald Trump shows little overt interest in retaining the United States’ soft-power edge. But his administration remains intensely interested in making U.S. exports successful, both for the sake of American companies’ bottom lines and for the United States’ reputation as a maker and purveyor of cutting-edge goods. Gun violence has become a cutting-edge U.S. export—but one that will harm, not help, its positive balance of power. If U.S. policymakers do not take gun violence more seriously, they will only ensure that this balance goes further off kilter.

 

 

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