"Gun Violence In America" by Gavin B.

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 Gun violence is a national issue. Violent gun reports are filed everyday. Some of these cases of gun violence are accidents, while some other gun violence cases are intentional acts of terrisiom. Some of these intentional ones are people shooting up schools and workplaces, pedestrians and cops, restaurants and neighborhoods. People commit these heinous acts and not all get caught. However, most do and serve their rightful time.

According to the Washington Post, 2021 has been the worst year for gun violence. Many people fear it will only get worse from here. Last weekend alone, more than 120 people died in shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, with three especially dangerous incidents in Austin, Chicago and Savannah, Ga., leaving two dead and at least 30 injured. Through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States, about 54 lives lost per day, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization. That’s 14 more deaths per day than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years. This year, the number of casualties, along with the overall number of shootings that have killed or injured at least one person, exceeds those of the first five months of 2020, which finished as the deadliest year of gun violence in at least two decades.

Experts have attributed the increase to a variety of new and long-standing issues,  including entrenched inequality, soaring gun ownership, and fraying relations between police and the communities they serve,  all intensified during the coronavirus pandemic and widespread uprisings for racial justice. The violence, its causes and its solutions have sparked wide-ranging and fierce policy debates. In July 2020, shooting deaths reached a peak of roughly 58 per day and continued, nearly unabated, around that level until early 2021. Now, the numbers are rising again. In the nation’s capital, 2020 set a recent record for homicides, mostly from gun violence, and their number is rising again, even with the annual summer crime prevention initiative well underway. Seventy-nine people were killed in the District during the first five months of 2021, a 23 percent increase over the previous year.

Researchers note a number of factors they say are driving the upswing, including the unprecedented surge in gun sales. In 2020, a year of pandemic, protests and elections, people purchased more than 23 million guns, a 66 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks. In January and February of 2021, people bought more guns than they did during either month of any previous year in which such purchases were recorded. In January alone, about 2.5 million guns were sold, the third-highest one-month total, behind only June and July of 2020.

Background checks need advanced measures put in place, possible limits on the amount of guns you can have, or qualifications to own a gun are just a few possible ways to help control gun violence. No matter what, there will be gun violence, but at least it can be controlled a little bit.

Works Cited

Wong, Herman “2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades. So far, 2021 is worse. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/14/2021-gun-violence/>

“MASS SHOOTINGS IN 2021” <https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting> 

“America's gun culture in charts” April 8th, 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081> 

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