CDC: Gun deaths surged to new high in ’20

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 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 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 gun-related incidents as the pandemic spread in the United States, the highest number on record, federal data shows. The violence exacted an unprecedented toll in Black communities, and early data suggests 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 percent 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.

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 the University of California, Davis.