DEAR AMERICA: Here's why everyone thinks you have a problem with guns

The community of Charleston, South Carolina, is still reeling after another mass shooting in America.

President Barack Obama on Friday delivered a moving eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine people who was gunned down last week at an historically African-American church in Charleston.

This has become an all-too-common routine for Obama: He has had to make a speech regarding a mass shooting at least once every year since taking office in 2009. But no meaningful gun-related legislation has passed through Congress during Obama's term in office.

Over the past 2.5 years - since Obama first pushed new gun measures in the wake of the elementary-school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut - the gun debate has become perhaps more polarizing than ever before. But what is clear is that other countries don't have the problems that the United States does. Other industrialized countries don't have tens of thousands of gun deaths per year, regular mass shootings, or a population as armed as it is violent. 

"This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," Obama said the day after 21-year old Dylann Roof allegedly shot nine people to death in the Charleston church.

Other countries don't have America's gun problem. 

Here, we take a look at the data that shows why America is so unlike the rest of the world when it comes to the popularity and the abuse of guns. We'll look at the role that policy-makers play in the gun control debate, and we'll look at what can be done (if anything). 

It isn't pretty, but it's important. Hundreds of thousands of American lives hang in the balance. 

Editor's note: Walter Hickey contributed to this post.