Gun violence is increasing more this year than any other in the past six years, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States — 54 deaths per day — the Post reported, citing an analysis of data from the non profit research organize Gun Violence Archive.
The Post reported the total is 14 more deaths per day than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years.
The number of 2021 casualties, along with the overall number of shootings that have killed or injured at least one person, exceeds those of the first five months of 2020, which finished as the deadliest year of gun violence in at least two decades, the Post noted in March.
Gunfire deaths began to rise in April 2020, when COVID-19 shut down much of the country, the Post reported, noting that in some of the nation’s biggest cities, homicides increased by a total of 30% when compared with 2019.
In July 2020, shooting deaths reached a peak of roughly 58 per day and continued around that level until early 2021.
For all of 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the Post reported — more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.
“There are many communities across this country that are dealing with ever-present gun violence that is just part of their daily experience,” Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise, told the Post.
“It doesn’t get the support, the spotlight, the national attention. People don’t understand that it’s continuous and it’s on the rise.”
In 2020, people purchased more than 23 million guns, a 66% increase over 2019 sales, according to a Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.
In January and February of 2021, people bought more guns than they did during either month of any previous year in which such purchases were recorded, the Post reported.
In January alone, about 2.5 million guns were sold, the third-highest one-month total, behind only June and July of 2020.
The Post found the number of fatal shootings the Gun Violence Archive classified as some type of accident increased by more than 40% from 2019 to 2020.
The number of deadly incidents involving children also rose by 45%.
The numbers of mass shootings, though slowed last year, are also rising, the Post reported, citing the public mass shootings database.
Twenty-two people have been killed in five other shootings since last March: At a weekend Juneteenth celebration in Charlotte, a July 4 block party in Chicago and at a convenience store in Springfield, Mo., among others.
On average, there was one mass shooting every 73 days in 2020, compared with one every 36 days in 2019 and one every 45 days in 2017 and 2018. The slowdown interrupted what had been a five-year trend of more frequent and more deadly mass shootings, the Post reported.
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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