The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings - Washington Post - 0 views
-
White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. Black men are 17 times as likely to be killed with a gun fired by someone else.
-
Two different demographic groups bear the brunt of escalating gun violence and are most likely to die of a gunshot wound in America: young Black men and older White men.
-
The vast majority of gun deaths in America are either suicides or homicides, according to federal data, with accidental or undetermined gun deaths representing a small fraction of the overall share.
- ...17 more annotations...
-
Monday’s rampage in Illinois marked the 15th time this year that four or more people were killed in a shootin
-
Of the 90,498 gun deaths in 2020 and 2021, 38,796 were homicides. Nearly 21,000 of those victims were Black men.
-
In 2020, while the overall crime rate nationwide fell, “that was not true for shootings,” Cook said. That year, he said, there was an “unparalleled” surge in people killed by firearms compared with 2019.
-
Solving more shootings, particularly nonfatal ones, “would interrupt the cycle of retaliation,” Cook said, and might improve local trust in the police. “That would be a productive use of money,” he said.
-
Police nationwide in 2020 “cleared” about half of all homicides, according to the FBI, which usually means that someone was arrested and charged or the case was closed another way, including the death of the attacker.
-
But three decades of research has established that people with mental illness are responsible for just a small percentage of interpersonal and gun violence.
-
“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said shortly after the Uvalde shooting in May.
-
It’s clear that many other factors are more closely associated with gun violence than mental illness. They include experiencing trauma and violence during childhood, being young and male, living in neighborhoods where violence is more prevalent, poor impulse control, poor anger control, and perhaps most of all, easy access to a firearm.
-
officials must help create environments where there is less trauma in the home, support families and strengthen services for children in schools.
-
In 1994, Duke University gun violence researcher Jeffrey W. Swanson calculated that if all active psychotic and mood disorders were eliminated overnight, interpersonal violence would be reduced by just 4 percent
-
“We don’t have gun control as much as we have people control,” he said. “We try to figure out the people who are so dangerous that we have to limit their access to guns.”
-
In many other countries, guns are tightly restricted, but the United States has taken a different route, he said.
-
people in Florida with serious mental illnesses, including some who were committed to a psychiatric facility involuntarily or for a short-term emergency hold, 0.9 percent were arrested for a violent crime involving a gun within seven years — about the same rate as the general population.
-
The 1998 MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, which followed 951 people who had been released from three psychiatric facilities, found that 23 committed 67 acts of interpersonal gun violence — a rate of 2 percent — in the next year. Just 19 of those acts, committed by nine people, were against strangers.
-
The consistent invocations of mental health after massacres such as those in Buffalo, Uvalde and Highland Park are ways for officials to distance themselves from the horror of the event, to explain the unfathomable,
-
“It’s a tragedy that demands explanation, and the stigma of mental illness is something that fuels pseudo-explanations,” she said. “It’s a fake explanation. Why has this man done this terrible thing? The answer is because he’s mentally ill. How do you know he’s mentally ill? Because he’s done this terrible thing.”