MIAMI – America’s bloody tradition of gun violence has made headlines in the last couple of days.
Twenty people died in three mass shootings in California in as many days. Two people were killed, three injured, in a mass shooting in Chicago, Illinois.
Since the beginning of this week, starting January 22nd, there have been seven mass shootings in which a total of 13 people were killed and 33 people were injured.
Since the beginning of the year, there have been 40 mass shootings across the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive, putting 2023 on pace to have the most mass shootings at this point of any year on record.
A total of 73 people were killed in them and 165 people injured.
The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.
The bipartisan gun safety bill signed into law last summer brought modest changes to the country’s gun legislation, but it didn’t touch assault rifles, the weapon of choice for many mass shooters.
On Monday, after the mass shootings in California President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass a pair of bills seeking to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and raise the purchasing age to 21, imploring lawmakers to “act quickly.”
“The majority of the American people agree with this common sense action. There can be no greater responsibility than to do all we can to ensure the safety of our children, our communities, and our nation,” he said in a statement.
Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among people younger than 24 in the United States, according to a study published in the December 2022 edition of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
From 2015 through 2020, there were at least 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18 in the US, according to a report from Everytown. Those shootings resulted in 765 deaths and 1,366 injuries.
A study published late last year in JAMA Network Open analyzed firearm deaths over the past three decades — a total of more than 1 million lives lost since 1990.
The researchers found that firearm mortality rates increased for most demographic groups in recent years, but vast disparities persisted. The homicide rate among young Black men- 142 homicide deaths for every 100,000 Black men ages 20 to 24 – was nearly 10 times higher than the overall firearm death rate in the US in 2021.
About 45% of US adults say they live in a household with a gun, according to an October 2022 Gallup survey.
