Guns cause shootings, not people, after all

After yet another mass school shooting, America is searching its soul once more about why it experiences so much gun violence.
Despite input from the country's Idiot-in-Chief, who suggests that US schools need to be "hardened not softened", and that the solution is to arm teachers, there seems to be a more serious feeling this time around that the time has finally come for something to be actually done on gun control, with several major companies publicly distancing themselves from the National Rifle Association (NRA), and with American teens at the forefront of the movement, speaking out (and apparently being heard).
Well, we've seen scenes of outrage over the country's gun culture before, and we've heard a whole bunch of different theories expounded over why the situation has devolved to its current sad state, from racial divisions to video games to a lack of mental health care, usually followed by a quiet return to the status quo and business as usual. But while many of these theories may be at least partially right, and are are worthy of attention and action, all of them have, according to a recent New York Times article, been debunked at some point by research on shootings elsewhere in the world.
The only thing that fully explains the prevalence of mass shootings in the USA, the article argues, is the brute fact of the sheer number of guns in the country.
A country with 4.4% of the world's population has 42% of the world's guns. What could possibly go wrong? Nearly a thord of all mass shootings take place in the USA. Only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings per capita, and it is no coincidence that Yemen has the second highest rate of gun ownership after the US (oh, and it is in the middle of a civil war and its society has essentially disintegrated).
So, it seems pretty clear that the problem stems from America's love affair with the gun, and its assumption that it is everyone's right to own one. So, contrary to what the NRA has repeated ad nauseam for decades it's not people that cause shootings, it's guns.