The one group in the United States most interested in leaving the country and permanently living somewhere else is American women ages 15 to 44. According to Gallup, 40 percent of women polled in my age bracket expressed this desire, double the rate of all U.S. adults. That tells me that the women who are building their lives and the lives of the next generation are looking for the exit.
Women in other, similar nations do not share this desire to relocate. In November, I asked readers who were considering moving what was driving them out.
While the responses were varied (the rollback of rights for women, immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people was mentioned by several), the most common reason cited was gun violence in the United States. Whether at the hands of fellow citizens or militarized law enforcement officers, this particular form of violence and its unremitting nature is just not a significant problem in our peer nations.
In 2025, there were more mass shootings in the United States than days in the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (which uses a broader definition than The Times). There were 75 school shootings. According to The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit focused on health equity, “The U.S. has among the highest overall firearm mortality rates, as well as among the highest firearm mortality rates for children, adolescents and women, both globally and among high-income countries”; Black Americans and American Indians are particularly likely to die from gun violence.
It feels as though we have hit a particularly horrifying patch of violence in the last month. A shooting at Brown University and the death of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, who was shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis, were beyond disturbing. Some elected officials seem more interested in spreading disinformation about killings like these while gaslighting and smearing victims than doing anything to stop it.
As Adam Serwer pointed out about Good’s death, the administration’s victim-blaming playbook — Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist” — is shopworn, and has been used to defend police killings for a long time. In 2020, I commissioned a personal essay by the writer Imani Bashir, who purchased a one-way ticket out of the United States in 2015 after the death of Sandra Bland while in police custody, and who felt that living abroad was the only way to keep her Black son safe.
“For my husband and me, the conversation was: Where could we safely raise a family? Where could we feel like we didn’t have a constant threat or target on our backs?” Bashir wrote. George Floyd’s killing was another reminder of why she did not want to return to raise her child here.
When I spoke to readers who were considering moving abroad, they expressed similar sentiments. For a variety of reasons, they described the feeling that violence was closing in on them, and that they needed to get out of the country. Emma Stamper, who has dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States and lives in the suburbs of Denver, said that multiple high-profile mass shootings in Colorado played into her thoughts of leaving. Stamper, who has a 3-year-old son and a 15-month-old daughter, works for a nonprofit and her husband is a programmer. They both work remotely, so relocation is more possible for them than it is for many families.
Stamper cited the September 2025 school shooting in Evergreen, Colo., and the 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. (It is a pathetic marker of how commonplace school shootings have become that I did not even remember the Evergreen incident when she mentioned it, even though it occurred within the past year.) She also talked about feeling a less tangible shift, a sense that there’s “a cultural aggression that continues to spiral,” in the United States.
I also spoke to a couple — the husband is a veteran who works for the federal government and the wife is a professor — who live outside a major West Coast city. (They asked that I not use their names for fear of retaliation.)The family, which includes a school-age child, spent several months of a sabbatical living in Europe. The wife described the “underlying hum of anxiety” that just went away when they were living outside the United States.
The lack of threat from gun violence was part of that. But it was bigger than just the guns. The husband told me that children were given so much more freedom in Europe. There was also a lack of the coddling and helicoptering involved in American parenting (perhaps because there were almost no guns). His wife said it wasn’t just the absence of fear she felt when living abroad; it was also the presence of care. “I realized that I felt held there by the culture, by the society, by people.”
No one I spoke to who was contemplating a move was ready to pick up and leave tomorrow, and no one could say what would be the last straw. The women I heard from seemed more willing to go than their husbands, which backs up what Gallup’s polling found. A permanent move away from one’s homeland and extended family is a huge change that requires planning and deliberation in normal circumstances.
I checked in with Imani Bashir, and she returned to the United States two years ago, after some deaths in her family and to be near her father, who was having health issues. She now lives in Washington, D.C., and said she is hypervigilant about her family’s safety. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not constantly concerned about being here and under governmental threat, let alone some maniac that might want to shoot up a school,” she told me.
While I could always understand intellectually why this country could exhaust people and compel them to move elsewhere, I remained personally comforted by statistics: Even in the United States, gun violence remains rare overall. I know that when my children leave the house, they’re more likely to die in a car crash than to be the victims of random gun violence or a school shooting. I have been profoundly disappointed by our government before, but I always felt like a proud American with a deep investment in making this country better.
But over the years, as these violent incidents have piled up, it has become harder to soothe myself with cold rationality. The hour after I heard about the shooting at Brown, where I went to college, I was Googling “going to university in Europe” for the first time. For a few days, I considered the idea that the future might be brighter for my daughters elsewhere.
For now, it’s just a passing thought, one that’s already in the rearview. But I can’t predict what is coming next.
End Notes
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The medical drama “The Pitt” is back! I watched the first episode of Season 2 on Thursday night, and I loved this profile of the show’s star, Noah Wyle, by Sam Anderson in The Times Magazine. Anderson is giving the people news we can use: “The YouTube commenters, I can confirm firsthand, are correct: At 54, Wyle appears to be aging into previously unexplored zones of handsomeness.”
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