By Arielle Kane
Last week I sat down to write about the 1 million American lives lost to COVID-19 over the past two years. But on that Friday, I happened to be standing outside my home with my dog when a man was gunned down right in front of me. And then in the week after, there were multiple mass shooting events, including a racially motivated grocery store rampage and another incomprehensible elementary school shooting. I realized that I needed to address another plague: gun violence.
When the COVID pandemic first started to wreak havoc on our country in 2020, Americans ran out and bought 22 million guns — a 64 percent spike over 2019. This led to record gun homicides and non-suicide-related shootings that claimed approximately 19,300 lives, a 25 percent increase from 2019, and injuring tens of thousands more. While official data aren’t yet available, this trend continued into 2021 and 2022.
Gun violence is a result of many interacting factors — poverty, trauma, a lack of education, discrimination and – of course – American’s effortless access to firearms. And during the COVID pandemic, increased psychological distress, erosion of social networks, high unemployment and record increases in gun sales led to a pandemic of violence. Altogether, the nation tallied roughly 93,000 injuries and deaths (including suicides) from gun-related violence between Jan. 1, 2019, and March 31, 2021.
Read the full piece in The Hill.
