Plague of gun violence returns to haunt America

There is nothing marking the spot where Angela White-hooks, a 52-year-old mother of three, was gunned down in a hail of 58 bullets outside her home in north-east Washington DC.

But the grim resignation of her neighbours as they pass in and out of the three-storey, brown-brick public housing complex, serves as its own testimony to the gun violence plaguing the US capital.

Ms White-hooks’s family say she was pulling a friend to safety during a shootout when she was hit by a stray bullet that was not meant for her. A tragic accident – but one that is now happening with increasing frequency.

Almost 200 people have been killed in Washington since January – a figure set to outpace 2020, which was itself the deadliest of the past 16 years.

The figures are embarrassing for a city that is home to the US government, but the nation’s capital is not an anomaly. America has seen a nationwide spike in violent deaths.

The national murder rate rose by almost 30 per cent in 2020 – the largest single-year increase since reliable records began – and in many places has stayed at that level throughout 2021.

Criminologists say there is no simple explanation for how the country erased two decades of progress in around a year and a half.

Researchers have pointed to a number of possible factors: the fear and uncertainty caused by the pandemic; rising political and social divisions; the unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; and reduced police activity.

Underscoring the fear gripping the nation is the record number of guns sold in 2020.

Just two days after Ms Whitehooks’s death last month, police found Dametrics Evans, 43, lying dead in a hallway of another apartment building in Washington. In a nearby flat they discovered a second gunshot casualty.

Two hours later, 26-year-old Aaron Langford was fatally stabbed in another residential complex just three miles away.

One of the youngest fatalities this year was Nyiah Courtney, a six-yearold who was riding her scooter along a pavement in the summer when she was caught in the crosshairs of a shootout that injured five adults.

In America’s largest cities, the spate of violence appears to be unrelenting. Chicago is on pace to have its worst murder rate in 25 years, with 649 people killed as of mid-october. Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, has recorded 388 homicides this year, a 29 per cent increase on last year.

The figures do not match the grisly peak of the early 1980s, when 10 in every 100,000 Americans were murdered each year, but they do match the violence of the late 1990s.

Dr Aaron Chalfin, a criminologist with the University of Pennsylvania, says it is difficult to attribute the increase to any socio-economic impact from the pandemic.

Despite the pandemic’s universal impact, the US is unique in witnessing a “gigantic rise in homicide”, he said.

However, he said the huge rise in gun carrying did appear to coincide with the onset of coronavirus.

Dr Chalfin is equally sceptical that calls to “defund the police” have had an effect, noting that few areas meaningfully cut police funding and that murder rates grew fairly equally across progressive and conservative regions alike.

However he does believe a police “pullback”, with fewer officers making stops or arrests, has had an impact.

For Ryane Nickens, who provides support for the families of victims of gun violence in Washington DC through an organisation called the Traron Centre, the pandemic simply “shined a light” on what she sees as another public health epidemic.

Ms Nickens, 43, a native of southeast Washington, has never known a life free from guns.

She was 14 years old when her heavily pregnant sister, Tracy, was killed during an argument with their next-door neighbour. Her mother and two other siblings were also injured in the fray. She lost her brother Ronnie in another shooting three years later.

What is different about the current climate, she said, is “the brazenness” with which people have begun to carry guns. “That is where the conversation should be placed when we talk about an uptick,” she said.

Communal gun violence is not restricted to the dead of night, but “happening in broad daylight”, she said, with a growing number of women and children caught in the crossfire.

Ms Nickens lives just 10 minutes away from the Mayfair Mansions building where Ms White-hooks was gunned down in late October.

She recognises the grief the victim’s three sons must now come to terms with. A recent visit to Mayfair Mansions showed that trauma is shared by all its inhabitants, regardless of whether or not they knew her personally.

Ms White-hooks’s neighbour, a young woman in her 20s, breaks into a smile as she remembers the 52-yearold, who was something of a matriarch in an economically deprived, majority black neighbourhood.

Her smile drops as she considers what the death means. “It makes you think it could happen to anybody when the nicest person in the neighbourhood is killed.”