Wake up, America. It's time to sort your sh*t out.

Guns kill people. People kill people. America, you have both.

This week, a young man opened fire in a church with a gun that he had received as a present from his father for his 21st birthday.

Dylann Roof didn’t receive a photo frame, a bottle of grog or a new shirt for his 21st. He received a gun.

On Wednesday night, Roof took that gun to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He sat with parishoners for an hour before standing up and shooting them. Roof killed nine people – the youngest was 26 and the oldest 87. As he was firing, he told the predominantly African-American congregation, “‘I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”

Later, Dylann Roof told police that he “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him”. In the end, he decided he had to ”go through with his mission”

Dylann Roof was a racist man. According to reports, his friends say he was showing signs of being violent and unstable. Whatever his motivations, triggers or pathologies, the fact is he picked up a gun, went into a church and shot strangers.

Now, America does not have a monopoly on people with murderous instincts. It is also not home to the only heinous racists in the world.

But it is the home of gun-related killings – more than any other developed country.

Let’s be clear about the scale here. The United States is home to almost 319 million people. It is also home to 310 million guns. There is a violent event that can be described as a ‘mass shooting’ in America every two weeks. The number of gun-related killings in America is 30 times that in Australia.

As a country, America has a love affair with guns. And in the most counter-intuitive statistic of all: In America when massacres like this happen, support for gun rights actually goes up, and support for gun control goes down. This is true even though research shows that in American states where there is tighter gun control, there are fewer murders.

More guns = more gun-related violence. It’s not that hard.

After the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, the Australian Government conducted an unprecedented gun buyback scheme that was popularly supported. Both gun homicides and gun suicides declined sharply, and we haven’t had a mass shooting on that scale since.

Yes, we have our own share of atrocities in Australia: Family violence, alcohol-fuelled violence, racism, and the way we treat our country’s First People. We need to clean our own house, no doubt

But America has a national obsession with guns. It is a national disease. And unless they take action, more people will die needlessly.

Do you agree that America needs to act on gun control?

For more on guns and the tragic loss of life:

Do playground toy guns cause massacres? 

Jessica died in the Colarado Massacre. This is what she wanted us to know.

A letter to my son about Elliot Rodger, the boy who killed so many.