Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Saturday, July 9th, 2022

The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings

Author:     Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein, Dan Keating, Andrew Ba Tran and Artur Galocha
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     July 8, 2022
 Link: The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings
Stephan:   There is no other nation in the developed world with these kinds of gun death statistics. That this goes on day after day, to a point where it has become normalized, by which I mean we constantly talk about it, but nothing ever gets done about it, tells the truth about America. Eliminating assault combat weapons is so obvious, and the evidence for this is so incontrovertible, that not doing it is a statement of this society's values. Guns are more important than people.

The spate of shooting attacks in communities such as Highland Park, Ill.; Uvalde, Tex.; and Buffalo has riveted attention on America’s staggering number of public mass killings. But the rising number of gun deaths in the United States extends beyond such high-profile episodes, emerging nearly every day inside homes, outside bars and on the streets of many cities, according to federal data.

[There have been over 300 mass shootings so far in 2022]

The surge in gun violence comes as firearm purchases rose to record levels in 2020 and 2021, with more than 43 million guns estimated to have been purchased during that period, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks. At the same time, the rate of gun deaths in those years hit the highest level since 1995, with more than 45,000 fatalities each year.

Guns account for most suicides and are almost entirely responsible for an overall rise in homicides across the country from 2018 to 2021, according to […]

Read the Full Article