Gun deaths surged in first year of pandemic
NEW YORK » Gun deaths reached the highest level ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, as gun-related homicides surged by 35%, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.
“This is a historic increase, with the rate having reached the highest level in over 25 years,” Dr. Debra E. Houry, acting principal deputy director of the CDC and the director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said at a news briefing.
More than 45,000 Americans died in gunrelated incidents as the pandemic spread in the United States, the highest number on record, federal data show. The violence exacted an unprecedented toll in Black communities, and early data suggest the trend continued through last year.
But more than half of gun deaths were suicides, and that number did not substantially increase from 2019 to 2020. The overall rise in gun deaths was 15% in 2020, lower than the percentage increase in gun homicides, the CDC said.
The rise in gun killings was the largest one-year increase seen in modern history, according to Ari Davis, a policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which recently released its own analysis of CDC data.
Homicides involving firearms were generally highest, and showed the largest increases, in poor communities, federal researchers said.
The rise has afflicted cities large and small around the country, and in both blue and red states. In many places, like Los Angeles and Denver, the increases have persisted in
2021, and trends this year so far show no sign of a reversal.
“We have two things together: the trauma of the past two years, and the mental health crisis that came out of this pandemic,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles said earlier this year at an event to discuss the city’s crime. “Those things have caused us to see more violence.”
Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he was not surprised by the CDC’s analysis but was worried by what it might augur in the coming summer, when there are typically more gun homicides.
“June, July, August are always the biggest shooting months,” he said, adding that most large American cities see about a 30% uptick in shootings and homicides in the summer.
Federal officials and outside experts are not certain what caused the surge in gun deaths overall. “One possible explanation is stressors associated with the COVID pandemic that could have played a role, including changes and disruption to services and education, social isolation, housing instability and difficulty covering daily expenses,” said Thomas R. Simon, associate director for science at the CDC’s division of violence prevention.
The rise also corresponded to accelerated sales of firearms as the pandemic spread and lockdowns became the norm, the CDC noted. Americans began a gun-buying spree in 2020 that continued into 2021, when in a single week the FBI reported a record 1.2 million background checks.
Today, gun buying has largely returned to prepandemic levels, but there remain roughly 15 million more guns in circulation than there would be without the pandemic, according to Garen J. Wintemute, a gun violence researcher at UC Davis.
But gun violence has many roots.
Federal researchers also cited disruptions in routine health care; protests over police use of lethal force; a rise in domestic violence; inequitable access to health care; and longstanding systemic racism that contributes to poor housing conditions, limited educational opportunities and high poverty rates.
Law enforcement officials and criminologists pointed not just to the pandemic, but also to the divisive presidential election in 2020, as gun buying tends to increase at times of deep political polarization.
And there is a sense, harder to quantify, that psyches are frayed — that citizens may be quicker to turn to violence when provoked.
“Something has happened to the American people during this two years that has taken violence to a new level,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that studies law enforcement policy.
“We don’t know what it is, but if you talk to police chiefs they will tell you that what used to be some small altercation now becomes a shooting and a homicide.”