The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Even in a pandemic, no rest from shootings
Nearly 20,000 in U.S. killed last year — most in at least two decades.
Until two lethal rampages in metro Atlanta and Boulder, Colo., this month, mass shootings had largely been absent from headlines during the coronavirus pandemic. But people were still dying — at a record rate.
In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.
The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the COVID-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color.
Last week’s shootings at spas in the Atlanta area and Monday’s shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killed a combined 18 people and rejuvenated a national effort to overhaul gun laws. But high-profile mass shootings such as those tend to overshadow the instances of everyday violence that account for most gun deaths,
potentially clouding some people’s understanding of the problem and complicating the country’s response, experts say.
“There are many communities across this country that are dealing with ever-present gun violence that is just part of their daily experience,” said Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise. “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.”
Shooting deaths in 2020 outpaced the next-highest recent year, 2017, by more than 3,600. The rise resembles other alarming trends: Last year, the United States saw the highest one-year increase in homicides since it began keeping records, with the country’s largest cities suffering a 30% spike. Gunshot injuries also rose dramatically, to nearly 40,000, over 8,000 more than in 2017.
“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides. “The majority are in Black and brown communities. We don’t really focus on gun violence until we have these mass shootings, but it’s an ongoing, chronic problem that affects a significant portion of our society.”
Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
COVID-19 and the protests against police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64% increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.
Dunn pointed to this flood of firearms as the most detrimental factor in the fight to curb gun violence. When shootings become “the soundscape of inner-city neighborhoods,” he said, “it increases anxiety and stress and creates toxic stress.” Dunn compared the effect to post-traumatic stress disorder akin to what war veterans experience.
One recent study called gun violence “a public health crisis decades in the making.” Analyzing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it found that Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 accounted for 37% of gun homicides, even though they made up 2% of the U.S. population — a rate 20 times higher than white males of the same age.
Failing to focus on this more common form of gun violence obscures the severity of the crisis, Dunn said.
Even though the rate of mass shootings slowed last year, several occurred before the killings in metro Atlanta and Boulder, according to the Post’s public mass shootings database.
Twenty-two people have been killed in five other shootings since last March: At a weekend Juneteenth celebration in Charlotte, N.C., 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.
That gun violence increased overall even as mass shootings declined underscores the fact that those high-profile events account for a relatively small share of firearm deaths. It should draw more attention to the victims and survivors of gun violence across the country, Barden said.
“They will bear the trauma and the scars of that catastrophe for the rest of their lives,” he said. “The collateral damage is unquantifiable, and it’s reaching almost everyone.”