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Abstract
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And the surge in violence doesn't show any signs of abating.
Last year was the deadliest for gun violence in the United States in decades, and the trend appears to be continuing. Gun violence (excluding suicide) accounted for 15,448 deaths and 30,186 injuries in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which collects and validates reports of gun violence and crime incidents from 7,500 sources daily. In 2020, those numbers rose to 19,411 and 39,492, respectively. As of mid-August, 12,562 people died and 25,155 were injured this year as a result of gun violence.
"Some of the factors that have been identified are the surge in firearm purchasing, massive unemployment, and isolation," says Garen J. Wintemute, MD, MPH, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
More firearms were purchased in 2020 than in any previous year since record keeping began in the late 1990s. A Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks published in January revealed there were about 23 million firearms purchases throughout 2020, a 64% increase over 2019 sales...
Language: en |