The Unit­ed States has only five per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, but some­where between 35 and 50 per­cent of the world’s pri­vate­ly owned guns. Is it a sur­prise, then, that we have sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er rates of gun vio­lence?

Accord­ing to research pub­lished by the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, homi­cide rates in the U.S. are 6.9 times high­er than they are in oth­er high-income nations. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the homi­cide rate is 42.7 times high­er. Firearm sui­cide rates are 5.8 times high­er in Amer­i­ca than in oth­er coun­tries, even though the over­all sui­cide rates are 30 per­cent low­er.

A suc­ces­sion of high-pro­file massacres–Columbine, Vir­ginia Tech, Sandy Hook–has tak­en place against a base­line of dai­ly gun deaths that rarely make the nation­al head­lines: mur­ders, sui­cides, acci­den­tal killings. Since the Decem­ber 14 mass mur­der at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School in New­town, Con­necti­cut, in which 20 chil­dren and six adults were gunned down by a heav­i­ly armed man, there have been well over 3,300 gun-relat­ed deaths in Amer­i­ca. If cur­rent trends con­tin­ue, gun deaths are pro­ject­ed to exceed traf­fic deaths for the first time by the year 2015.

So what is being done? At the fed­er­al lev­el, noth­ing.

Ear­li­er this month the Sen­ate not only struck down leg­is­la­tion to ban assault weapons and high-capac­i­ty gun mag­a­zines, it also struck down–at the will of a 45-mem­ber minority–a bipar­ti­son com­pro­mise to expand back­ground checks for gun buy­ers, a mea­sure sup­port­ed by 90 per­cent of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.

In response to the paral­y­sis (some would say cow­ardice) on Capi­tol Hill, a group of 23 promi­nent car­toon­ists, includ­ing Gar­ry Trudeau, Ruben Bolling, Art Spiegel­man and Tom Tomor­row, have joined forces to fight back against the gun lob­by. The car­toon (above) was orga­nized by May­ors Against Ille­gal Guns, and is nar­rat­ed by actors Julianne Moore and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man.

“Enough. Demand action,” say Moore and Hoff­man. “As a dad, as a mom, as a hus­band, as a wife, as a fam­i­ly, as a friend. As an Amer­i­can. It’s time. We can’t back down. It’s time for our lead­ers to act right now. Demand action”

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