Gun violence: Why is it rising?

America is experiencing “an exceedingly bloody summer,” said John Eligon in The New York Times. While both total crime and overall violent crime are down nationwide, shootings have become an “all-too-familiar” occurrence. Homicides were up 37 percent from May to

June in 20 large U.S. cities, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. In New York City, the murder rate is up 30 percent over 2019; Chicago just saw its bloodiest month in 28 years, with 106 people shot and 14 killed over a single weekend; and Kansas City is on pace to shatter its record of

153 homicides. “We’re surrounded by murder,” said Erica Mosby, whose 20-year-old pregnant niece was recently killed in a random Kansas City shooting while she pushed a stroller. “It’s terrible.”

Criminologists have a number of theories to explain this spike, said German Lopez in Vox .com. The pandemic brought a sharp increase in gun sales, and then Black Lives Matter protests may have led police to pull back from patrols and arrests, sparking frustrated citizens to take matters into their own hands. That’s also what happened in some cities in 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., with officers fearing that “any act of aggressive policing could get them in trouble.” Fluctuations in crime rates “are notoriously difficult to explain,” said Spencer Bokat-Lindell in The New York Times. This summer’s gun-violence spike comes on the heels of an equally inexplicable threedecade-long downward trend in U.S. violent crime. That said, murder rates typically tick up in the summer; gun sales exploded from March to June, and the senseless nature of much of the violence has analysts wondering if the pandemic’s frayed nerves and economic havoc are playing a major role.

It’s probably a “confluence of forces,” said Jon Hilsenrath in The Wall Street Journal. Our streets were “emptied of eyes and ears” by lockdowns and fears of infection, while gangs and other criminals were emboldened by the partial closure of courts and release of some offenders from jails. President Trump blames weak Democratic mayors, but surges in gun violence are also being seen in cities run by Republicans, such as Tulsa and San Diego. Is the long-term decline in violent crime now reversing, or will this summer be an aberration? No one knows, “but a great deal hangs on that question.”