Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, as gun-related homicides surged by 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, according to The New York Times.
“This is a historic increase, with the rate having
reached the highest level in over 25 years,” Dr. Debra E. Houry, acting
principal deputy director of the C.D.C. and the director of the National Center
for Injury Prevention and Control, said at a news briefing.
More than 45,000 Americans died in gun-related
incidents as the pandemic spread in the United States, the highest number on
record, federal data show. The gun homicide rate was the highest reported since
1994.
That represents the largest one-year increase in gun
homicides in modern history, according to Ari Davis, a policy adviser at the
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which recently released its
own analysis of C.D.C. data.
Cities from coast to coast have seen bloody episodes
of gun violence since the pandemic began, but the new report is official
confirmation of something that many Americans had already sensed: Amid the
stress and upheaval, citizens turned to guns in numbers rarely seen.
The new numbers reveal not only startling increases
in the rates of gun homicide, but also document “widened disparities” that
existed even before the pandemic began, the C.D.C. said.
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Homicides involving firearms were generally highest,
and showed the largest increases, in poor communities, and exacted a
disproportionate toll on younger Black men in particular. Deaths of Black
women, though smaller in number, also increased significantly.
More than half of gun deaths were suicides, however,
and that number did not substantially increase from 2019 to 2020. The overall
rise in gun deaths therefore was 15 percent in 2020, the C.D.C. said.
The rise in gun violence has afflicted cities large
and small, in both blue and red states, leaving law enforcement scrambling for
answers. In many places, like Los Angeles and Denver, the increases have
persisted in 2021, and trends this year so far show no sign of a reversal.
“We have two
things together: the trauma of the past two years, and the mental health crisis
that came out of this pandemic,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles
said earlier this year at an event to discuss crime.
“Those things have caused us to see more violence.”
Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor in the
department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in
New York, said he was not surprised by the C.D.C.’s analysis but was worried by
what it might augur in the coming summer, when there are typically more gun
homicides.
“June, July, August are always the biggest shooting
months,” he said, adding that most large American cities see about a 30 percent
uptick in shootings and homicides in the summer.
Federal officials and outside experts were not
certain what caused the surge in gun deaths.
“One possible explanation is stressors associated
with the Covid pandemic that could have played a role, including changes and
disruption to services and education, social isolation, housing instability and
difficulty covering daily expenses,” said Thomas R. Simon, associate director
for science at the C.D.C.’s division of violence prevention.
The rise also corresponded to accelerated sales of
firearms as the pandemic spread and lockdowns became the norm, the C.D.C.
analysis noted. Americans went on a gun-buying spree in 2020 that continued
into 2021, when in a single week the F.B.I. reported a record 1.2 million
background checks.
The primary reason people give for purchasing a
handgun is self-protection. But research published in the 1990s established
that simply having a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun homicide by a
factor of three, and increases the risk of a suicide by a factor of five.
Today, gun buying has largely returned to
prepandemic levels, but there remain roughly 15 million more guns in
circulation than there would be without the pandemic, according to Garen J.
Wintemute, a gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis.
But gun homicide has many roots. Federal researchers
also cited disruptions in routine health care; protests over police use of
lethal force; a rise in domestic violence; inequitable access to health care;
and longstanding systemic racism that has contributed to poor housing
conditions, limited educational opportunities and high poverty rates.
Law enforcement officials and criminologists pointed
not just to the pandemic, but also to the divisive presidential election in
2020, as gun buying tends to increase at times of deep political polarization.
And there is a sense, harder to quantify, that
psyches are frayed — that citizens may be quicker to turn to violence when
provoked.
“Something has happened to the American people
during this two years that has taken violence to a new level,” said Chuck
Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a
nonprofit that studies law enforcement policy.
“We don’t know what it is, but if you talk to police
chiefs they will tell you that what used to be some small altercation now
becomes a shooting and a homicide.”
Black Americans remained disproportionately affected
by gun violence in 2020. Firearm homicide rates increased by 39.5 percent among
Black people from 2019 to 2020, to 11,904. The victims were overwhelmingly
young men.
The Johns Hopkins analysis found that Black men ages
15 to 34 accounted for 38 percent of all gun homicide victims in 2020, though
this group represented just 2 percent of the U.S. population.
Black men ages 15 to 34 were more than 20 times more
likely to be killed with a gun than white men of the same age. The number of
Black women killed by guns also increased by almost 50 percent in 2020 compared
with 2019, Mr. Davis said.
Rising rates of gun-related homicides were seen in
all racial and ethnic groups, except among Americans of Asian and Pacific
Islander descent, who saw a small decrease.
Gun-related suicides have long been more common
among older white men. But in 2020, rates rose mostly sharply among Native
Americans and Alaska Native groups, although the numbers were still small
compared with those among white men.
“We’re going to need to develop different types of
solutions to deal with different types of gun violence,” Mr. Davis said.
The last time homicide rates involving firearms
peaked was during the crack epidemic of 1993-94, said Andrew Morral, a senior
behavioral scientist at RAND Corporation and the director of the National
Collaborative on Gun Violence Research. Rates declined until 2015, but have
been inching up ever since.
“It’s pretty alarming,” Mr. Morral said. “It’s a
bigger jump than I would have expected.”
But there is no solid explanation for the decline or
the rise, he added: “In a sense it’s a mystery. It’s the big question everyone
wants the answer to. Everyone has a theory, but it’s very hard to test the
theories.”
Even if the pandemic is part of the answer, “that
doesn’t explain why rates have been rising since 2016,” he said.
The C.D.C. is currently funding 18 research projects
aimed at identifying causes of gun violence and developing solutions. The
research spans a broad range of interventions: One experiment relies on
outreach workers to mediate potentially lethal conflicts in a community, while
another provides services to teens and young adults who have been hospitalized
with gun injuries.
Others involve distribution of free lockboxes for
storing firearms safely in the home.
Projects like these were frozen under the 1996
Dickey Amendment, named after Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of
Arkansas, which barred the C.D.C. from spending money to advocate or promote
gun control.
Congress has restored $25 million in funding for
firearm injury prevention research, which is split between the C.D.C. and the
National Institutes of Health.
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